If you are like me, and I dearly hope you are (because I don’t want to think of you as the kind of parent who makes elaborate plastic-surgery- and 50-Shades-of-Grey-themed mishloach manot baskets), you’ve left your children’s Purim costumes until the last second.

Our spiritual leader should be the mom who dressed her infant son (HER SON) as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween last year. Big glasses, ruffly collar (made from a dollar-store doily or one of those bobby-pinnable old-lady-head-covering thingies from the cheap yarmulke box in your shul), oversized black robe (a black dress from your wardrobe or a large black T-shirt, depending on size of kid, will do), plastic hammer from the toy bench as a gavel stand-in and boom, you dissenting goddess you. Ruth Baby Ginsburg, everyone.

If you are like me, and I dearly hope you are (because I don’t want to think of you as the kind of parent who makes elaborate plastic-surgery- and 50-Shades-of-Grey-themed mishloach manot baskets), you’ve left your children’s Purim costumes until the last second.

Our spiritual leader should be the mom who dressed her infant son (HER SON) as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween last year. Big glasses, ruffly collar (made from a dollar-store doily or one of those bobby-pinnable old-lady-head-covering thingies from the cheap yarmulke box in your shul), oversized black robe (a black dress from your wardrobe or a large black T-shirt, depending on size of kid, will do), plastic hammer from the toy bench as a gavel stand-in and boom, you dissenting goddess you. Ruth Baby Ginsburg, everyone.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress on the dangers presented by a nuclear Iran, in a much-awaited event that had been the source of great controversy. Nearly 60 Democratic lawmakers boycotted the speech, in protest of what they characterized as a politicized attempt by Republican Speaker John Boehner to undermine President Obama’s foreign policy with Netanyahu’s assistance.

The speech was pointed, passionate and effective–as even critics agreed—the hallmarks of a Netanyahu address. It checked all the requisite boxes, laying out the various geopolitical threats posed by Iran, outlining concerns with currently considered proposals for a nuclear deal, and even offering the obligatory reference to the Purim story. “This deal won’t be a farewell to arms,” Netanyahu warned, “it would be a farewell to arms control.” What will prove less predictable than the speech’s content, however, is the impact it will have–if any.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress on the dangers presented by a nuclear Iran, in a much-awaited event that had been the source of great controversy. Nearly 60 Democratic lawmakers boycotted the speech, in protest of what they characterized as a politicized attempt by Republican Speaker John Boehner to undermine President Obama’s foreign policy with Netanyahu’s assistance.

The speech was pointed, passionate and effective–as even critics agreed—the hallmarks of a Netanyahu address. It checked all the requisite boxes, laying out the various geopolitical threats posed by Iran, outlining concerns with currently considered proposals for a nuclear deal, and even offering the obligatory reference to the Purim story. “This deal won’t be a farewell to arms,” Netanyahu warned, “it would be a farewell to arms control.” What will prove less predictable than the speech’s content, however, is the impact it will have–if any.

Much has been written since the passing of Leonard Nimoy about his embrace of Judaism, whether through the priestly blessings, provocative photographs, or Yiddish theater. All of that is true but incomplete. It is in his best known character, Mr. Spock, that Nimoy most fully resonated as a Jew. Consider the following:

Much has been written since the passing of Leonard Nimoy about his embrace of Judaism, whether through the priestly blessings, provocative photographs, or Yiddish theater. All of that is true but incomplete. It is in his best known character, Mr. Spock, that Nimoy most fully resonated as a Jew. Consider the following:

This year’s AIPAC Policy Conference had all the pomp of a coronation and uncritical love of a bar mitzvah as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was bathed in the adoring partisan embrace of 16,000 pro-Israel supporters on Monday.

The timing was neither coincidental nor apolitical. Every moment was staged in anticipation of Netanyahu’s showdown on Capitol Hill today where he will address both houses of Congress and make his case for a uranium-rein Iran.

This year’s AIPAC Policy Conference had all the pomp of a coronation and uncritical love of a bar mitzvah as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was bathed in the adoring partisan embrace of 16,000 pro-Israel supporters on Monday.

The timing was neither coincidental nor apolitical. Every moment was staged in anticipation of Netanyahu’s showdown on Capitol Hill today where he will address both houses of Congress and make his case for a uranium-rein Iran.

Each day this week, the Scroll will be featuring a post from a writer at JN Magazine—short for “Jewnited Nations”—a website “here to change the monochromatic monolithic perception of Judaism.” Each post has been commissioned and edited by MaNishtana, the pseudonym of Shais Rishon, a Tablet contributor and editor-at-large at JN Magazine.

My 12-year-old daughter, Kenya, has never been a sugar and spice and everything nice type of girl. She patiently endured pink clothes until she was about three years old, at which point she demanded red. Or purple. Or blue. Just anything but pink, and for goodness sake, no more glitter.

When Kenya was in preschool I stopped wasting money on dolls, which she consistently ignored in favor of basketballs, soccer balls, baseballs, and skateboards. She played running back and wide receiver on her elementary school’s flag football team, and was indignant when I broke the news to her that in junior high, football is not co-ed.

I am smart enough to know that my kids are going to be who they’re going to be regardless, so I generally step aside and let them be themselves. But there were a couple of times a year when my son and daughter were smaller that I allowed myself to nudge. OK, fine: interfere.

Halloween and Purim. Those were mine.

My 10-year-old son has always been malleable and will wear any costume presented to him. He accepts them gratefully, poses for photos upon request, and smiles.

Kenya, who is months away from commencing her teens, does not smile. Kenya glowers. Because for years—years—I have been holding up one frilly princess dress after another and saying, “Please? What? Why not?” At the sight of them, my daughter’s eyes glow red and I can almost feel the laser beams burning my skin.

I managed to get a Tinkerbell fairy costume on her for her first Halloween. At a year old, she couldn’t talk or put up a fight. But in subsequent years she trick-or-treated as, among other things, a skeleton, a dragon, a pirate, and most recently, a zombie.

This is what I’m up against.

I slinked off and licked my wounds in October. But spring? Ah, spring was another matter. In the springtime, I had Purim.

No, you will not be a ninja, young lady. We are commemorating the story of Queen Esther. The operative word here being “queen.” And what does a queen wear?

Each day this week, the Scroll will be featuring a post from a writer at JN Magazine—short for “Jewnited Nations”—a website “here to change the monochromatic monolithic perception of Judaism.” Each post has been commissioned and edited by MaNishtana, the pseudonym of Shais Rishon, a Tablet contributor and editor-at-large at JN Magazine.

My 12-year-old daughter, Kenya, has never been a sugar and spice and everything nice type of girl. She patiently endured pink clothes until she was about three years old, at which point she demanded red. Or purple. Or blue. Just anything but pink, and for goodness sake, no more glitter.

When Kenya was in preschool I stopped wasting money on dolls, which she consistently ignored in favor of basketballs, soccer balls, baseballs, and skateboards. She played running back and wide receiver on her elementary school’s flag football team, and was indignant when I broke the news to her that in junior high, football is not co-ed.

I am smart enough to know that my kids are going to be who they’re going to be regardless, so I generally step aside and let them be themselves. But there were a couple of times a year when my son and daughter were smaller that I allowed myself to nudge. OK, fine: interfere.

Halloween and Purim. Those were mine.

My 10-year-old son has always been malleable and will wear any costume presented to him. He accepts them gratefully, poses for photos upon request, and smiles.

Kenya, who is months away from commencing her teens, does not smile. Kenya glowers. Because for years—years—I have been holding up one frilly princess dress after another and saying, “Please? What? Why not?” At the sight of them, my daughter’s eyes glow red and I can almost feel the laser beams burning my skin.

I managed to get a Tinkerbell fairy costume on her for her first Halloween. At a year old, she couldn’t talk or put up a fight. But in subsequent years she trick-or-treated as, among other things, a skeleton, a dragon, a pirate, and most recently, a zombie.

This is what I’m up against.

I slinked off and licked my wounds in October. But spring? Ah, spring was another matter. In the springtime, I had Purim.

No, you will not be a ninja, young lady. We are commemorating the story of Queen Esther. The operative word here being “queen.” And what does a queen wear?

Six weeks ago, Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran’s nuclear threat, setting off a political firestorm. President Obama, who will pointedly not be meeting with Netanyahu while he’s in Washington, D.C., has criticized the address for threatening a potential nuclear agreement with Iran, the details of which were revealed by Reuters yesterday.

Obama maintains a diplomatic agreement is the best way to halt Iran’s nuclear threat. He’s also suggested that the timing of Netanyahu’s speech—weeks ahead of a Knesset election in Israel, in which Netanyahu is bidding for another term as prime minister—is inappropriate. Netanyahu, the leader of a country existentially threatened by a nuclear Iran, prefers a stronger approach, and by taking his case to Congress hopes to forestall a nuclear deal he believes would be too lenient on Iran.

Six weeks ago, Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran’s nuclear threat, setting off a political firestorm. President Obama, who will pointedly not be meeting with Netanyahu while he’s in Washington, D.C., has criticized the address for threatening a potential nuclear agreement with Iran, the details of which were revealed by Reuters yesterday.

Obama maintains a diplomatic agreement is the best way to halt Iran’s nuclear threat. He’s also suggested that the timing of Netanyahu’s speech—weeks ahead of a Knesset election in Israel, in which Netanyahu is bidding for another term as prime minister—is inappropriate. Netanyahu, the leader of a country existentially threatened by a nuclear Iran, prefers a stronger approach, and by taking his case to Congress hopes to forestall a nuclear deal he believes would be too lenient on Iran.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-talked about speech to Congress about Iran’s nuclear threat happening today at 11 a.m., and much of the country’s political leadership divided over its usefulness and appropriateness, a new poll shows something altogether surprising given the tense atmosphere surrounding the address: Netanyahu’s favorability ratings are up among Americans.

According to the Gallup poll, published yesterday in anticipation of The Speech, 45 percent of Americans view Netanyahu favorably, as compared to 24 percent who view him unfavorably—a sizable increase from 2012, when his favorability rate was 35 percent. “His current favorable rating ties his highest rating among the six times Gallup has measured it, spanning his three tenures as prime minister,” the poll reports.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-talked about speech to Congress about Iran’s nuclear threat happening today at 11 a.m., and much of the country’s political leadership divided over its usefulness and appropriateness, a new poll shows something altogether surprising given the tense atmosphere surrounding the address: Netanyahu’s favorability ratings are up among Americans.

According to the Gallup poll, published yesterday in anticipation of The Speech, 45 percent of Americans view Netanyahu favorably, as compared to 24 percent who view him unfavorably—a sizable increase from 2012, when his favorability rate was 35 percent. “His current favorable rating ties his highest rating among the six times Gallup has measured it, spanning his three tenures as prime minister,” the poll reports.

When I escaped from Iran in 1982 at the age of 17, I took a heart-wrenching journey into the unknown, crossing the dangerous Kavira Loot Desert in the company of smugglers. I was one of the first in my family to leave the country. I took nothing with me except my belief in freedom, a sense of my own identity, and my love for home and family.

Today, as we count down the days to Purim, I remember my life in Iran, and I feel my heart grow full. For most Jews, Purim and the story of Queen Esther provide the community with an opportunity to celebrate Jewish survival. For me, Purim and Esther bring me back to my hometown of Shiraz and the steps I, like Esther, took to stay true to myself.

When I escaped from Iran in 1982 at the age of 17, I took a heart-wrenching journey into the unknown, crossing the dangerous Kavira Loot Desert in the company of smugglers. I was one of the first in my family to leave the country. I took nothing with me except my belief in freedom, a sense of my own identity, and my love for home and family.

Today, as we count down the days to Purim, I remember my life in Iran, and I feel my heart grow full. For most Jews, Purim and the story of Queen Esther provide the community with an opportunity to celebrate Jewish survival. For me, Purim and Esther bring me back to my hometown of Shiraz and the steps I, like Esther, took to stay true to myself.

Can Jews rely on gentile courts to dispense justice? The question arose in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in the course of an extended discussion of the major subject of Tractate Ketubot so far: female chastity. And the rabbis’ answer speaks volumes about their experience with the Roman and Persian governments they lived under. Many moments in the Talmud make clear that Jews in Talmudic times—as in much, perhaps most, of Jewish history—saw non-Jews as potential persecutors. (In Tractate Eruvin, for instance, we learned that a Jew should never live alone among gentiles, for fear that they will murder him.) And the Talmud periodically refers to times when the laws cannot be enforced due to government persecution—as happened after the Bar Kochba revolt in the 2nd century C.E., not long before the Mishna was written down.

Can Jews rely on gentile courts to dispense justice? The question arose in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in the course of an extended discussion of the major subject of Tractate Ketubot so far: female chastity. And the rabbis’ answer speaks volumes about their experience with the Roman and Persian governments they lived under. Many moments in the Talmud make clear that Jews in Talmudic times—as in much, perhaps most, of Jewish history—saw non-Jews as potential persecutors. (In Tractate Eruvin, for instance, we learned that a Jew should never live alone among gentiles, for fear that they will murder him.) And the Talmud periodically refers to times when the laws cannot be enforced due to government persecution—as happened after the Bar Kochba revolt in the 2nd century C.E., not long before the Mishna was written down.

For many children and adults alike, what makes Purim Purim are the customs that turn it into a celebration of topsy-turviness. While sometimes entertaining and usually innocuous, these customs—drunkenness, farcical plays, costumes—remain a contentious matter in Jewish law and raise larger questions regarding the underlying meaning of the holiday.

The only raucous Purim custom with Talmudic roots is the notion of getting drunk on the holiday. The Talmud seems initially to encourage intoxication at Purim feasts, even as it cautions against the potential dangers. While some medieval figures continued to argue in favor of getting drunk—or, at the very least, getting tipsy—others strongly objected. The fear of inappropriate behavior led two prominent 20th century scholars, Rabbis Yisrael Kagan and Yehiel Epstein, to advocate against it, a position hard to ignore given the many dangerous alcohol-related incidents that take place yearly.

For many children and adults alike, what makes Purim Purim are the customs that turn it into a celebration of topsy-turviness. While sometimes entertaining and usually innocuous, these customs—drunkenness, farcical plays, costumes—remain a contentious matter in Jewish law and raise larger questions regarding the underlying meaning of the holiday.

The only raucous Purim custom with Talmudic roots is the notion of getting drunk on the holiday. The Talmud seems initially to encourage intoxication at Purim feasts, even as it cautions against the potential dangers. While some medieval figures continued to argue in favor of getting drunk—or, at the very least, getting tipsy—others strongly objected. The fear of inappropriate behavior led two prominent 20th century scholars, Rabbis Yisrael Kagan and Yehiel Epstein, to advocate against it, a position hard to ignore given the many dangerous alcohol-related incidents that take place yearly.

Issachar Miron, composer of the ubiquitous song “Tzena Tzena,” died January 29 at 95, according to a New York Timesobituary published this week. Just as the optimistic military anthem has been played the world over, Miron led a life spreading the joys of Jewish music wherever he went.

Miron, born Stefan Michrovsky in Poland, emigrated to Israel as a young man after losing his entire family in the Holocaust. He originally co-wrote “Tzena Tzena” as a soldier in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in Palestine. The anthem has been sung in nearly 40 languages, and was notably popularized in the United States by Pete Seeger and the Weavers.

Issachar Miron, composer of the ubiquitous song “Tzena Tzena,” died January 29 at 95, according to a New York Timesobituary published this week. Just as the optimistic military anthem has been played the world over, Miron led a life spreading the joys of Jewish music wherever he went.

Miron, born Stefan Michrovsky in Poland, emigrated to Israel as a young man after losing his entire family in the Holocaust. He originally co-wrote “Tzena Tzena” as a soldier in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in Palestine. The anthem has been sung in nearly 40 languages, and was notably popularized in the United States by Pete Seeger and the Weavers.

Welcome to Will Eisner Week, which runs through March 7 and celebrates the legacy of the comics great. Eisner, who died in 2005, is widely considered to be the inventor of the modern graphic novel, and the annual Eisner Awards are among the most prestigious comic book honors. Will Eisner Week takes place each year during the week of March 6, which was Eisner’s birthday—this year marks the 98th anniversary of his birth.

Welcome to Will Eisner Week, which runs through March 7 and celebrates the legacy of the comics great. Eisner, who died in 2005, is widely considered to be the inventor of the modern graphic novel, and the annual Eisner Awards are among the most prestigious comic book honors. Will Eisner Week takes place each year during the week of March 6, which was Eisner’s birthday—this year marks the 98th anniversary of his birth.

Tom Schweich was the auditor of Missouri, gearing up for the Republican primaries in an attempt to run for governor. On February 26, he was found with a gunshot wound that investigators are saying was self-inflicted, and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Now, political insiders are saying that his death may have had to do with a smear tactics used against him—attempts to discredit his reputation, by bringing up his Jewish ancestry.

Tony Messenger, an editorial columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, revealed in the newspaper that Schweich had told him about an anti-Semitic “whisper campaign” against him, orchestrated by John Hancock, the head of the Missouri Republican Party.

Tom Schweich was the auditor of Missouri, gearing up for the Republican primaries in an attempt to run for governor. On February 26, he was found with a gunshot wound that investigators are saying was self-inflicted, and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Now, political insiders are saying that his death may have had to do with a smear tactics used against him—attempts to discredit his reputation, by bringing up his Jewish ancestry.

Tony Messenger, an editorial columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, revealed in the newspaper that Schweich had told him about an anti-Semitic “whisper campaign” against him, orchestrated by John Hancock, the head of the Missouri Republican Party.

A new Pew Research Center study has found, unsurprisingly, that European anti-Semitism is intensifying. The study, covering 2011 to 2013, found that incidents are at a seven-year high, occurring in 34 out of Europe’s 45 countries. This figure surpassed even the number of countries with notable levels of Islamophobia, also on the rise.

This study records “social hostilities,” meaning incidents perpetuated by individuals, unconnected with official governmental policies. Pew cited incidents ranging from anti-Semitic graffiti or vandalization of Jewish memorials to the threatening online publication of a list of Italian-Jewish homes and businesses. The study also tracked when “organized groups used force or coercion to try to impose their views on religion,” “individuals were assaulted or displaced from their homes or places of worship in retaliation for religious activities,” and discrimination against women based on religious dress.

A new Pew Research Center study has found, unsurprisingly, that European anti-Semitism is intensifying. The study, covering 2011 to 2013, found that incidents are at a seven-year high, occurring in 34 out of Europe’s 45 countries. This figure surpassed even the number of countries with notable levels of Islamophobia, also on the rise.

This study records “social hostilities,” meaning incidents perpetuated by individuals, unconnected with official governmental policies. Pew cited incidents ranging from anti-Semitic graffiti or vandalization of Jewish memorials to the threatening online publication of a list of Italian-Jewish homes and businesses. The study also tracked when “organized groups used force or coercion to try to impose their views on religion,” “individuals were assaulted or displaced from their homes or places of worship in retaliation for religious activities,” and discrimination against women based on religious dress.

Each day this week, the Scroll will be featuring a post from a writer at JN Magazine—short for “Jewnited Nations”—a website “here to change the monochromatic monolithic perception of Judaism.” Each post has been commissioned and edited by MaNishtana, the pseudonym of Shais Rishon, a Tablet contributor and editor-at-large at JN Magazine.

In my former life, Halloween was my favorite holiday. I loved everything about it, the costumes, the fear that ran through me as I imagined all of the otherwordly creatures stalking me in the shroud of the night, the decorations, the stories, and, of course, the candy.

Each day this week, the Scroll will be featuring a post from a writer at JN Magazine—short for “Jewnited Nations”—a website “here to change the monochromatic monolithic perception of Judaism.” Each post has been commissioned and edited by MaNishtana, the pseudonym of Shais Rishon, a Tablet contributor and editor-at-large at JN Magazine.

In my former life, Halloween was my favorite holiday. I loved everything about it, the costumes, the fear that ran through me as I imagined all of the otherwordly creatures stalking me in the shroud of the night, the decorations, the stories, and, of course, the candy.

In 2005, the year I became a Jew, I celebrated Purim for the first time. I’d heard that the classic Purim costume for little girls was Queen Esther; but since I was a 40-year-old divorcee, I decided to put my own twist on it. I went not as Queen Esther, heroine of the Purim story, but as the other Queen Esther: my overweight, neurotic black cat. I wore black slacks and a fuzzy black sweater, drew whiskers on my cheeks, donned furry cat ears, and sewed a tail to my pants. Nobody else really got the joke, but I thought myself quite hilarious for adhering to my new religion’s convention while also making it my own. I wore the same costume to my shul’s Purimspiel the next year, and the next.

But a few years later, I took a class at my shul about the chagim, the holidays, and I came to have a new appreciation for Purim. It’s the only day in the entire year when Jews are commanded to drop the mantle of rationalism or reason. We aren’t just supposed to drink to get a pleasant buzz, but to drink to the dangerous point where we can’t tell right from wrong, Haman (evil) from Mordecai (good). Purim is infused with this erasure of duality, the blurring of lines that ordinarily form the foundation of Jewishness—including the most central separation between the holy and the profane. It is the day to slide over to the Other side, the chaotic realm that inheres to the abandonment of distinction. My rabbi said that we should consider choosing a costume that reflects a kind of hidden or fantasy side of one’s personality.

In 2005, the year I became a Jew, I celebrated Purim for the first time. I’d heard that the classic Purim costume for little girls was Queen Esther; but since I was a 40-year-old divorcee, I decided to put my own twist on it. I went not as Queen Esther, heroine of the Purim story, but as the other Queen Esther: my overweight, neurotic black cat. I wore black slacks and a fuzzy black sweater, drew whiskers on my cheeks, donned furry cat ears, and sewed a tail to my pants. Nobody else really got the joke, but I thought myself quite hilarious for adhering to my new religion’s convention while also making it my own. I wore the same costume to my shul’s Purimspiel the next year, and the next.

But a few years later, I took a class at my shul about the chagim, the holidays, and I came to have a new appreciation for Purim. It’s the only day in the entire year when Jews are commanded to drop the mantle of rationalism or reason. We aren’t just supposed to drink to get a pleasant buzz, but to drink to the dangerous point where we can’t tell right from wrong, Haman (evil) from Mordecai (good). Purim is infused with this erasure of duality, the blurring of lines that ordinarily form the foundation of Jewishness—including the most central separation between the holy and the profane. It is the day to slide over to the Other side, the chaotic realm that inheres to the abandonment of distinction. My rabbi said that we should consider choosing a costume that reflects a kind of hidden or fantasy side of one’s personality.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/189251/transgressive-spirit-purim/feed0Jewish Mothers Go Over the Top for Purim, in the Mishloach Manot Warshttp://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/188969/mishloach-manot-wars
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/188969/mishloach-manot-wars#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 05:00:31 +0000Tova Rosshttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188969

When Mordechai and Esther were saving the Jewish people from the clutches of the evil Haman more than 2,000 years ago, they never could have imagined that their story would someday be commemorated with an erotic gift basket. And yet this year, as the film adaptation of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey plays in theaters across the country, one of the more popular items Sara Beth Fein is selling for Purim is a Fifty Shades-themed mishloach manot package; the $60 basket contains red wax lips, black rope licorice, and candy “handcuffs.” (“I couldn’t find kosher candy handcuffs anywhere,” said Fein, “so I had to improvise with kosher candy bracelets.”) Those who might find the theme too risqué can instead order Fein’s “I’m Saving Up for Plastic Surgery” mishloach manot complete with nose-shaped cake pops, a Bochox brand chocolate bar, a syringe pen, and a bra-shaped cookie.

“Anyone who is a creative person like I am loves celebrating Purim,” said Fein, of Teaneck, New Jersey. A longtime party planner who had often volunteered to make her friends’ mishloach manot—gifts of food to friends and family for Purim as per the commandment to ensure everyone has enough food for the feast held late in the day—Fein decided this year to go into the Purim business by selling her original mishloach manot and advertising on social media. “People have definitely been trying to outdo their neighbor more and more in the past decade or two, even among my former community in Queens, which is usually among the more laid-back Jewish communities. I’m happy to oblige by supplying people with inspired ideas.”

When Mordechai and Esther were saving the Jewish people from the clutches of the evil Haman more than 2,000 years ago, they never could have imagined that their story would someday be commemorated with an erotic gift basket. And yet this year, as the film adaptation of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey plays in theaters across the country, one of the more popular items Sara Beth Fein is selling for Purim is a Fifty Shades-themed mishloach manot package; the $60 basket contains red wax lips, black rope licorice, and candy “handcuffs.” (“I couldn’t find kosher candy handcuffs anywhere,” said Fein, “so I had to improvise with kosher candy bracelets.”) Those who might find the theme too risqué can instead order Fein’s “I’m Saving Up for Plastic Surgery” mishloach manot complete with nose-shaped cake pops, a Bochox brand chocolate bar, a syringe pen, and a bra-shaped cookie.

“Anyone who is a creative person like I am loves celebrating Purim,” said Fein, of Teaneck, New Jersey. A longtime party planner who had often volunteered to make her friends’ mishloach manot—gifts of food to friends and family for Purim as per the commandment to ensure everyone has enough food for the feast held late in the day—Fein decided this year to go into the Purim business by selling her original mishloach manot and advertising on social media. “People have definitely been trying to outdo their neighbor more and more in the past decade or two, even among my former community in Queens, which is usually among the more laid-back Jewish communities. I’m happy to oblige by supplying people with inspired ideas.”

Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List is largely credited with revitalizing Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, in which many of the movie’s iconic scenes were filmed. Krzysztof Bielawski, who runs Virtual Shtetl, the impressive website from Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, asks whether Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Holocaust film Ida could have a similar effect on the places it features. (h/t Tablet contributor Ruth Ellen Gruber’s Jewish Heritage Europe, another excellent resource for information about Jewish sites in Europe.)

The film follows soon-to-be nun Anna and her acerbic aunt Wanda on a journey both emotional and very much physical. As J. Hoberman described it, “Ida is thus a kind of investigatory road film in which, driving through rural Poland, the cloistered novice learns more about life’s cruelties and her country’s recent past than she would surely ever want to know—while her aunt, whose belief in her own secular faith has long since eroded, is forced to re-experience the trauma she would prefer had remained buried.”

Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List is largely credited with revitalizing Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, in which many of the movie’s iconic scenes were filmed. Krzysztof Bielawski, who runs Virtual Shtetl, the impressive website from Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, asks whether Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Holocaust film Ida could have a similar effect on the places it features. (h/t Tablet contributor Ruth Ellen Gruber’s Jewish Heritage Europe, another excellent resource for information about Jewish sites in Europe.)

The film follows soon-to-be nun Anna and her acerbic aunt Wanda on a journey both emotional and very much physical. As J. Hoberman described it, “Ida is thus a kind of investigatory road film in which, driving through rural Poland, the cloistered novice learns more about life’s cruelties and her country’s recent past than she would surely ever want to know—while her aunt, whose belief in her own secular faith has long since eroded, is forced to re-experience the trauma she would prefer had remained buried.”

Leonard Nimoy, who died today of chronic pulmonary disease at the age of 83, was almost like a family member to me. For as long as I can remember, his grave visage, sometimes with his pointy ears and sometimes without, festooned my father’s study in posters and figurines and Pez dispensers (the above photo is the Spock I knitted for him one Hanukkah, after my own design. It made him happier than anything else I have ever given him.)

Star Trek in general, and Mr. Spock in particular, loomed large in the mythology of our family. My sister and I grew up hearing stories about my father’s restless period of unemployment in Austin in the early 1970s, when daytime reruns of the original Rodenberry series provided a comforting bulwark in an uncertain, and to hear him tell it, overwhelmingly depressive time. Its strange mix of high camp and deeply felt idealism appealed to him, and to my mother, who would often watch with him when she came home for lunch from her graduate classes or bookkeeping job, and Mr. Spock was by far the character they loved best. My father, whose remote, intellectual manner similarly hides a deep well of empathetic warmth, identified with the Vulcan half-breed, whose lack of emotional expression didn’t mean he didn’t have them, and my mother loved Spock because she loved my dad.

Leonard Nimoy, who died today of chronic pulmonary disease at the age of 83, was almost like a family member to me. For as long as I can remember, his grave visage, sometimes with his pointy ears and sometimes without, festooned my father’s study in posters and figurines and Pez dispensers (the above photo is the Spock I knitted for him one Hanukkah, after my own design. It made him happier than anything else I have ever given him.)

Star Trek in general, and Mr. Spock in particular, loomed large in the mythology of our family. My sister and I grew up hearing stories about my father’s restless period of unemployment in Austin in the early 1970s, when daytime reruns of the original Rodenberry series provided a comforting bulwark in an uncertain, and to hear him tell it, overwhelmingly depressive time. Its strange mix of high camp and deeply felt idealism appealed to him, and to my mother, who would often watch with him when she came home for lunch from her graduate classes or bookkeeping job, and Mr. Spock was by far the character they loved best. My father, whose remote, intellectual manner similarly hides a deep well of empathetic warmth, identified with the Vulcan half-breed, whose lack of emotional expression didn’t mean he didn’t have them, and my mother loved Spock because she loved my dad.

In 2005, Abigail Pogrebin published Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. The following is an excerpt from the chapter about Leonard Nimoy, the beloved actor best known for portraying Mr. Spock in the Star Trek TV series and films, who died today at 83.

“‘JEW BASTARD’ was something I heard a lot,” says actor Leonard Nimoy, who grew up in an Orthodox family in Boston. We’re sitting in his serene, beige and cream living room overlooking the Museum of Natural History, decorated with some of the art photographs he’s taken—a hobby that has morphed into an obsession over the years.

In 2005, Abigail Pogrebin published Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. The following is an excerpt from the chapter about Leonard Nimoy, the beloved actor best known for portraying Mr. Spock in the Star Trek TV series and films, who died today at 83.

“‘JEW BASTARD’ was something I heard a lot,” says actor Leonard Nimoy, who grew up in an Orthodox family in Boston. We’re sitting in his serene, beige and cream living room overlooking the Museum of Natural History, decorated with some of the art photographs he’s taken—a hobby that has morphed into an obsession over the years.

Today, Netflix released the third season of its acclaimed political drama House of Cards, headlined by Kevin Spacey as corrupt President Frank Underwood. Last night, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and current candidate for the Knesset, took advantage of the cultural moment to post his own House of Cards-themed political ad. He even took a stab at imitating Underwood’s Southern drawl.

Today, Netflix released the third season of its acclaimed political drama House of Cards, headlined by Kevin Spacey as corrupt President Frank Underwood. Last night, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and current candidate for the Knesset, took advantage of the cultural moment to post his own House of Cards-themed political ad. He even took a stab at imitating Underwood’s Southern drawl.

Madonna, the outspoken singer whose lithe performance at last month’s Grammy Awards makes it hard to believe exactly how long she’s been an outspoken singer, gave an interview to Europe 1 in which she doubled down against France’s far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, onto whose face the Material Girl projected a (backwards) swastika during concerts a few years back. (Le Pen threatened to sue). Madonna also condemned the current climate in France, saying “anti-Semitism is at an all-time high.”

The frightening reality faced by the Jews of France for the past year—heightened by last month’s Charlie Hebdomassacre in Paris and subsequent deadly siege at a kosher supermarket across the city—is no secret. The toxic atmosphere has led French Jews to flee for Israel in record numbers. But many pundits and politicians have danced around just what, exactly, to compare the situation in France.

Madonna, the outspoken singer whose lithe performance at last month’s Grammy Awards makes it hard to believe exactly how long she’s been an outspoken singer, gave an interview to Europe 1 in which she doubled down against France’s far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, onto whose face the Material Girl projected a (backwards) swastika during concerts a few years back. (Le Pen threatened to sue). Madonna also condemned the current climate in France, saying “anti-Semitism is at an all-time high.”

The frightening reality faced by the Jews of France for the past year—heightened by last month’s Charlie Hebdomassacre in Paris and subsequent deadly siege at a kosher supermarket across the city—is no secret. The toxic atmosphere has led French Jews to flee for Israel in record numbers. But many pundits and politicians have danced around just what, exactly, to compare the situation in France.

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem quivers with the sort of nervous intensity common to good horror films and bad marriages: Everyone is polite and speaks softly, but you can tell that some monstrous force is just waiting for the right moment to bite.

Congregated in a small room in Haifa’s rabbinical court are the film’s eponymous heroine, a hairdresser (played by the exquisite Ronit Elkabetz, who also co-wrote and co-directed the film with her brother, Shlomi) and her husband. She is suing for a get, the traditional Jewish divorce document a husband must grant his wife. He refuses her pleas. The judges, bearded eminences, summon witnesses, the couple’s friends and family members, to account for the state of the Amsalems’ union. Rage builds up quietly, in characters and viewers alike, as all ask, with an increasing sense of urgency, just why it is that sweet Viviane is being denied the most basic of human rights, the right to be free and love whomever she wants?

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem quivers with the sort of nervous intensity common to good horror films and bad marriages: Everyone is polite and speaks softly, but you can tell that some monstrous force is just waiting for the right moment to bite.

Congregated in a small room in Haifa’s rabbinical court are the film’s eponymous heroine, a hairdresser (played by the exquisite Ronit Elkabetz, who also co-wrote and co-directed the film with her brother, Shlomi) and her husband. She is suing for a get, the traditional Jewish divorce document a husband must grant his wife. He refuses her pleas. The judges, bearded eminences, summon witnesses, the couple’s friends and family members, to account for the state of the Amsalems’ union. Rage builds up quietly, in characters and viewers alike, as all ask, with an increasing sense of urgency, just why it is that sweet Viviane is being denied the most basic of human rights, the right to be free and love whomever she wants?

The psychoanalyst Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin takes the view that, in order to make sense of the violent jihadis, it is fine and good to look at studies and analyses of Islamist ideology such as the ones that I have been writing—but really we ought to peer a little more deeply. She laid out her argument in Tablet magazine a few weeks ago. You can find it here. It is stimulating to read. A deeper look, in her estimation, will bring us into the subterranean zones of psychology.

She emphasizes the appeal of sadomasochism, which she describes as “the thrill of violence, power, and control that comes from inflicting pain on others”—though for some reason the second half of the word and the peculiar thrill of having pain inflicted upon oneself seems not to figure in her analysis. She tells us about “the debilitation of growing up in a shame-honor culture,” which impedes maturity. She describes a syndrome that she calls “the maternal drama,” which makes it hard for children in “Arab Muslim culture” to separate from their mothers and leads to “a perversion.” She touches on a few other matters—a difficulty in developing an individual identity, as opposed to a group identity, and so forth. “My theory,” she tells us, invoking her own research and the findings of neuroscience, “is that terrorists may not fully develop empathy”—which does seem to be the case. But mostly she points to the sadomasochism, the “shame-honor culture,” and the “maternal drama”—the three factors lying “at the heart of Islamist terrorism.”

The psychoanalyst Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin takes the view that, in order to make sense of the violent jihadis, it is fine and good to look at studies and analyses of Islamist ideology such as the ones that I have been writing—but really we ought to peer a little more deeply. She laid out her argument in Tablet magazine a few weeks ago. You can find it here. It is stimulating to read. A deeper look, in her estimation, will bring us into the subterranean zones of psychology.

She emphasizes the appeal of sadomasochism, which she describes as “the thrill of violence, power, and control that comes from inflicting pain on others”—though for some reason the second half of the word and the peculiar thrill of having pain inflicted upon oneself seems not to figure in her analysis. She tells us about “the debilitation of growing up in a shame-honor culture,” which impedes maturity. She describes a syndrome that she calls “the maternal drama,” which makes it hard for children in “Arab Muslim culture” to separate from their mothers and leads to “a perversion.” She touches on a few other matters—a difficulty in developing an individual identity, as opposed to a group identity, and so forth. “My theory,” she tells us, invoking her own research and the findings of neuroscience, “is that terrorists may not fully develop empathy”—which does seem to be the case. But mostly she points to the sadomasochism, the “shame-honor culture,” and the “maternal drama”—the three factors lying “at the heart of Islamist terrorism.”

An Argentinian judge has dismissed prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s accusations against Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Nisman, who was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head last month hours before he was to present controversial findings before a Congressional Committee, accused Kirchner of conspiring with Iran to obstruct a probe into the deadly 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. In an allegation he filed before his death, Nisman also found that Kirchner had directed her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Héctor Timerman, to remove Iran from the case in hope that it would strengthen trade of Argentinian grain for Iranian oil.

The New York Timesreports that Judge Daniel Rafecas ruled Thursday that the criminal allegations put forward by Nisman before his death were not sufficient to open an investigation into Kirchner. The allegations did not “minimally hold up,” according to Judge Rafecas’ 63-page report.

An Argentinian judge has dismissed prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s accusations against Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Nisman, who was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head last month hours before he was to present controversial findings before a Congressional Committee, accused Kirchner of conspiring with Iran to obstruct a probe into the deadly 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. In an allegation he filed before his death, Nisman also found that Kirchner had directed her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Héctor Timerman, to remove Iran from the case in hope that it would strengthen trade of Argentinian grain for Iranian oil.

The New York Timesreports that Judge Daniel Rafecas ruled Thursday that the criminal allegations put forward by Nisman before his death were not sufficient to open an investigation into Kirchner. The allegations did not “minimally hold up,” according to Judge Rafecas’ 63-page report.

At 12:01 a.m. today, marijuana became legal (well, kinda-sorta) in Washington, D.C. It’s been decriminalized in Colorado, Washington state and Alaska; Oregon passed an initiative that takes effect in July; five more states face upcoming ballot initiatives on legalization. In 24 states, medical marijuana is legal.

So with pot becoming increasingly accepted and available (57 percent of Americans live in states that have decriminalized possession and/or allow medical marijuana, and 86 percent of all Americans support medical marijuana), the Orthodox Union announced earlier this week that it would be willing to offer its kosher certification to qualified medical marijuana products. (Hey, there’s gold in them thar ills.)

At 12:01 a.m. today, marijuana became legal (well, kinda-sorta) in Washington, D.C. It’s been decriminalized in Colorado, Washington state and Alaska; Oregon passed an initiative that takes effect in July; five more states face upcoming ballot initiatives on legalization. In 24 states, medical marijuana is legal.

So with pot becoming increasingly accepted and available (57 percent of Americans live in states that have decriminalized possession and/or allow medical marijuana, and 86 percent of all Americans support medical marijuana), the Orthodox Union announced earlier this week that it would be willing to offer its kosher certification to qualified medical marijuana products. (Hey, there’s gold in them thar ills.)

When you’re an American living abroad, you get used to the fear of bad news from home. When the phone rings bearing an unfamiliar American number, you wonder if someone is in the hospital. As your email loads in the morning, you imagine that something disastrous has happened overnight.

But nothing could prepare me for the punch in the gut I felt when I heard that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show reign was coming to an end. In saying goodbye to him, I wouldn’t just be losing a beloved decade-long tradition, I’d be bidding farewell to what had become my lifeline: a quick, easy, and casual way to keep in touch with family and, as a Jew living in Germany, to remember where I had come from.

When you’re an American living abroad, you get used to the fear of bad news from home. When the phone rings bearing an unfamiliar American number, you wonder if someone is in the hospital. As your email loads in the morning, you imagine that something disastrous has happened overnight.

But nothing could prepare me for the punch in the gut I felt when I heard that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show reign was coming to an end. In saying goodbye to him, I wouldn’t just be losing a beloved decade-long tradition, I’d be bidding farewell to what had become my lifeline: a quick, easy, and casual way to keep in touch with family and, as a Jew living in Germany, to remember where I had come from.

Pop star Katy Perry, in Europe for her ‘Prismatic World Tour,’ visited Auschwitz yesterday after her concert in Krakow. She posted an Instagram photo from the former concentration camp, with an emotional message for her 15 million followers.

Pop star Katy Perry, in Europe for her ‘Prismatic World Tour,’ visited Auschwitz yesterday after her concert in Krakow. She posted an Instagram photo from the former concentration camp, with an emotional message for her 15 million followers.

For all of 15 minutes last weekend, Patricia Arquette was a progressive hero. Arquette, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar Sunday evening for her role in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, used the final few seconds of her acceptance speech to deliver a stirring plea for female equality. “To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights—it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” Arquette declared, to enthusiastic cries of approval and passionate finger-pointing from fellow celebrities Jennifer Lopez and Meryl Streep.

But in the time it took for Arquette to move from the Academy stage to answer questions from the press, she went from a liberal champion who used her two minutes of fame to speak passionately on behalf of a cause that she believed in to the latest target of the left’s ritualistic Two Minutes of Hate. Her offense: “It’s time,” she said, “for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

For all of 15 minutes last weekend, Patricia Arquette was a progressive hero. Arquette, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar Sunday evening for her role in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, used the final few seconds of her acceptance speech to deliver a stirring plea for female equality. “To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights—it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” Arquette declared, to enthusiastic cries of approval and passionate finger-pointing from fellow celebrities Jennifer Lopez and Meryl Streep.

But in the time it took for Arquette to move from the Academy stage to answer questions from the press, she went from a liberal champion who used her two minutes of fame to speak passionately on behalf of a cause that she believed in to the latest target of the left’s ritualistic Two Minutes of Hate. Her offense: “It’s time,” she said, “for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

“What am I going to say to mom?” Lin asked her sister Martha. It was 1987, and Lin and her husband Peter had decided to adopt a black baby. A sculptor who carves and assembles wooden knots, bridges, and ladders, Lin was raised in an open-minded secular Jewish home. But she wasn’t certain how her mother would react to the prospect of having a black grandchild. “Tell her about adoption first,” Martha advised. “Give her a couple of weeks to let it sink in, and then talk to her about race.”

A short, wiry woman with untamed curly hair, Lin remembers calling her mother. “We’re going to adopt children but it will take a while.” Her mother’s response surprised her. “Not if you adopt black children!”

“What am I going to say to mom?” Lin asked her sister Martha. It was 1987, and Lin and her husband Peter had decided to adopt a black baby. A sculptor who carves and assembles wooden knots, bridges, and ladders, Lin was raised in an open-minded secular Jewish home. But she wasn’t certain how her mother would react to the prospect of having a black grandchild. “Tell her about adoption first,” Martha advised. “Give her a couple of weeks to let it sink in, and then talk to her about race.”

A short, wiry woman with untamed curly hair, Lin remembers calling her mother. “We’re going to adopt children but it will take a while.” Her mother’s response surprised her. “Not if you adopt black children!”

The ongoing contretemps over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to a joint meeting of Congress has once again put a spotlight on the troubled relationship between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, with both leaders’ supporters arguing that their guy is more justifiably offended.

Analyzing the timeline of events, Tablet columnist Liel Leibovitz seemed to suggest that Netanyahu is way too smart a politician to have helped engineer such a cock-up, and therefore the controversy can be fairly laid at Obama’s doorstep. Yet, while Leibovitz mocked the idea that Netanyahu sought to achieve any domestic political benefit from the speech, a recent poll conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University found that “a large majority (67 percent) thinks the timing of Netanyahu’s trip, right at the peak of the election campaign, was central to his decision to go to Washington and address Congress there; in other words, that he is using a speech abroad to influence the election results at home.” Also criticizing the timing of the speech, former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser Chuck Freilich wrote that Netanyahu has “subordinated Israel’s most crucial strategic interests to election considerations.”

The ongoing contretemps over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to a joint meeting of Congress has once again put a spotlight on the troubled relationship between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, with both leaders’ supporters arguing that their guy is more justifiably offended.

Analyzing the timeline of events, Tablet columnist Liel Leibovitz seemed to suggest that Netanyahu is way too smart a politician to have helped engineer such a cock-up, and therefore the controversy can be fairly laid at Obama’s doorstep. Yet, while Leibovitz mocked the idea that Netanyahu sought to achieve any domestic political benefit from the speech, a recent poll conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University found that “a large majority (67 percent) thinks the timing of Netanyahu’s trip, right at the peak of the election campaign, was central to his decision to go to Washington and address Congress there; in other words, that he is using a speech abroad to influence the election results at home.” Also criticizing the timing of the speech, former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser Chuck Freilich wrote that Netanyahu has “subordinated Israel’s most crucial strategic interests to election considerations.”

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study indicating that giving babies peanut products can prevent peanut allergy by as much as 81 percent.

One of the authors, Gideon Lack, is a professor of pediatric allergy at Kings College, London who’d already published a study in 2008 showing that the rate of peanut allergy in Israeli Jewish kids is only about a tenth that of British Jewish kids.

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study indicating that giving babies peanut products can prevent peanut allergy by as much as 81 percent.

One of the authors, Gideon Lack, is a professor of pediatric allergy at Kings College, London who’d already published a study in 2008 showing that the rate of peanut allergy in Israeli Jewish kids is only about a tenth that of British Jewish kids.

Well, it’s official: A Madoff miniseries is coming soon to a television screen near you. Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss is slated to star as the notorious fraudster in ABC’s multi-part something or other based on Brian Ross’ book The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth. Fun, right?

Obviously, a big splashy adaptation of one of the most shameful episodes in American Jewish and economic history was inevitable. The fall of the House of Madoff, in all its cruelty, hubris, and abjection is second only to that of the House of Atreus in terms of tragic dramatic potential. (You can almost imagine it adapted, Greek-style, with a chanting chorus and scenes of Olympian interference.) And Dreyfuss, an intense live-wire of an actor whom we haven’t seen nearly enough of lately, seems like a perfect choice for the Queens-born, self-justifying sociopath.

Well, it’s official: A Madoff miniseries is coming soon to a television screen near you. Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss is slated to star as the notorious fraudster in ABC’s multi-part something or other based on Brian Ross’ book The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth. Fun, right?

Obviously, a big splashy adaptation of one of the most shameful episodes in American Jewish and economic history was inevitable. The fall of the House of Madoff, in all its cruelty, hubris, and abjection is second only to that of the House of Atreus in terms of tragic dramatic potential. (You can almost imagine it adapted, Greek-style, with a chanting chorus and scenes of Olympian interference.) And Dreyfuss, an intense live-wire of an actor whom we haven’t seen nearly enough of lately, seems like a perfect choice for the Queens-born, self-justifying sociopath.

Upon winning an Oscar for his adapted screenplay of The Imitation Game, Graham Moore gave one of the most-discussed speeches of Sunday’s Academy Awards. He explained that he had attempted suicide at age 16, and urged young people watching the show, “Stay weird. Stay different. And then when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along.”

A nice Jewish boy, Moore brought his mother with him to the Academy Awards.

Upon winning an Oscar for his adapted screenplay of The Imitation Game, Graham Moore gave one of the most-discussed speeches of Sunday’s Academy Awards. He explained that he had attempted suicide at age 16, and urged young people watching the show, “Stay weird. Stay different. And then when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along.”

A nice Jewish boy, Moore brought his mother with him to the Academy Awards.

A new study from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Trinity College found that anti-Semitism is on the rise on U.S. college campuses. Their National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students polled 1,157 students about their campus experience, and found that 44 to 73 percent, with an average of 54 percent, reported experiencing anti-Semitism during the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year.

The study found that anti-Semitism pervades all campuses, not just ones with strong anti-Israel activism or in parts of the country where Jews are a smaller minority.

A new study from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Trinity College found that anti-Semitism is on the rise on U.S. college campuses. Their National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students polled 1,157 students about their campus experience, and found that 44 to 73 percent, with an average of 54 percent, reported experiencing anti-Semitism during the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year.

The study found that anti-Semitism pervades all campuses, not just ones with strong anti-Israel activism or in parts of the country where Jews are a smaller minority.

The documentary Catfish, released in 2010, followed Nev Schulman along the journey of finding out that his new love and her entire network of extended family and friends were not who they claimed to be. Apparently, Nev—or his humiliation—tapped into something, because two years later MTV launched its television version of Catfish, which has regularly garnered top ratings in the network’s most coveted demographic. (The fourth season premieres tonight.) Now Schulman has a new book out, one that positions him to be—well, if not the voice of his generation, at least a voice of one sliver of his generation, the sliver that is so consumed by social media that its greatest humiliations happen with people they have never met in person.

When I insisted on meeting Schulman, he insisted that we meet in Lincoln Center. Waiting for him, I found myself nervously ruminating on why he chose this spot. Less than 50 feet away, there was a swarm of kids from nearby middle schools and high schools, gathering for post-graduation photos. MTV’s core demographic was crowding around me; watching them, my anxiety grew. Would we even have a chance to talk, or would he be swarmed? But then the concern faded. Schulman’s face, I realized, could be blown up on a billboard overlooking Lincoln Center, with his Semitic dark olive skin and ever-present, ever-full five o’clock shadow, and they still wouldn’t notice him. They couldn’t see each other for real, so busy were they with the glass on their phones, the screens on their cameras.

The documentary Catfish, released in 2010, followed Nev Schulman along the journey of finding out that his new love and her entire network of extended family and friends were not who they claimed to be. Apparently, Nev—or his humiliation—tapped into something, because two years later MTV launched its television version of Catfish, which has regularly garnered top ratings in the network’s most coveted demographic. (The fourth season premieres tonight.) Now Schulman has a new book out, one that positions him to be—well, if not the voice of his generation, at least a voice of one sliver of his generation, the sliver that is so consumed by social media that its greatest humiliations happen with people they have never met in person.

When I insisted on meeting Schulman, he insisted that we meet in Lincoln Center. Waiting for him, I found myself nervously ruminating on why he chose this spot. Less than 50 feet away, there was a swarm of kids from nearby middle schools and high schools, gathering for post-graduation photos. MTV’s core demographic was crowding around me; watching them, my anxiety grew. Would we even have a chance to talk, or would he be swarmed? But then the concern faded. Schulman’s face, I realized, could be blown up on a billboard overlooking Lincoln Center, with his Semitic dark olive skin and ever-present, ever-full five o’clock shadow, and they still wouldn’t notice him. They couldn’t see each other for real, so busy were they with the glass on their phones, the screens on their cameras.

In the mid-1970s I was the proverbial Wandering Jew. Born and raised in Atlanta, my younger sister and I had an erratic upbringing, having lost our mother to cancer when I was 10, then raised by a series of governesses. Though my mother was Jewish, my father was Protestant and a churchgoer, and consequently I never was bar mitzvahed. My sister adjusted well, eventually marrying and raising a family. As for me, after making the rounds of private schools, I dropped out of college and, after a couple of years on the West Coast, was bumming around Europe. I had seen all the trademark sights: London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, the Alps. People I’d met had spoken well of Copenhagen. The few specifics that stood out appealed to me: Copenhagen was on the concert circuit, weed was easy to get and, most appealing, there were blondes. Lots of blondes.

On the surface, Copenhagen looks rather generic European, a city of brick and concrete and tile and verdigris dulled by leaden skies. It’s also a flat city, with a flat skyline pierced by church towers and the occasional high-rise. Being flat makes Copenhagen a city of bike riders. Everybody bikes here, from kids peddling to school, to suited businessmen and women peddling to work.

In the mid-1970s I was the proverbial Wandering Jew. Born and raised in Atlanta, my younger sister and I had an erratic upbringing, having lost our mother to cancer when I was 10, then raised by a series of governesses. Though my mother was Jewish, my father was Protestant and a churchgoer, and consequently I never was bar mitzvahed. My sister adjusted well, eventually marrying and raising a family. As for me, after making the rounds of private schools, I dropped out of college and, after a couple of years on the West Coast, was bumming around Europe. I had seen all the trademark sights: London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, the Alps. People I’d met had spoken well of Copenhagen. The few specifics that stood out appealed to me: Copenhagen was on the concert circuit, weed was easy to get and, most appealing, there were blondes. Lots of blondes.

On the surface, Copenhagen looks rather generic European, a city of brick and concrete and tile and verdigris dulled by leaden skies. It’s also a flat city, with a flat skyline pierced by church towers and the occasional high-rise. Being flat makes Copenhagen a city of bike riders. Everybody bikes here, from kids peddling to school, to suited businessmen and women peddling to work.

The first things you see when you enter the current temporary exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin are the life-sized, hyper-realistic sculptures of two naked men.

One is a dark-skinned Australian Aborigine, a plaster model made for anthropological purposes in 1939. The other is a 1998 sculpture in resin by the Canadian artist Evan Penny, depicting a thin man with very pale skin named Murray.

The first things you see when you enter the current temporary exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin are the life-sized, hyper-realistic sculptures of two naked men.

One is a dark-skinned Australian Aborigine, a plaster model made for anthropological purposes in 1939. The other is a 1998 sculpture in resin by the Canadian artist Evan Penny, depicting a thin man with very pale skin named Murray.

Israel retains broad support among Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, but that has not prevented fractious debate about Israeli policies.

Today’s divisions over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress have a partisan hue, with Republicans largely supporting the speech and Democrats largely opposed. Last summer, although national surveys reported substantial support for Israel in its war with Hamas, they also reported a generational divide, with older Americans more likely than younger Americans to view Israel’s conduct of the war as justified.

Israel retains broad support among Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, but that has not prevented fractious debate about Israeli policies.

Today’s divisions over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress have a partisan hue, with Republicans largely supporting the speech and Democrats largely opposed. Last summer, although national surveys reported substantial support for Israel in its war with Hamas, they also reported a generational divide, with older Americans more likely than younger Americans to view Israel’s conduct of the war as justified.

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.

How could a young man of 18 years—the image of a 1920s intellectual, with a high forehead, an intense gaze behind round glasses, and a combed-back mass of wavy black hair—who entered with such enthusiasm into Yale, this temple of knowledge, so severely flounder there? Why would this voracious student, craving intellectual debates, so confident in his abilities after his string of successes in Portland, Oregon, completely fail to find his place at this elite university? Why did the trajectory of Marcus Rothkowitz, who for the past eight years had been thrown into a dynamic, frenzied integration into American society—from Dvinsk to Portland—falter so easily at this point, in less than two years in New Haven, which would surely seem to have so much to offer him? Was it due to his youthful idealism and ingenuousness? To a matter of timing? Not just that. What, then, lay behind the dismal failures of his freshman and sophomore years at Yale?

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.

How could a young man of 18 years—the image of a 1920s intellectual, with a high forehead, an intense gaze behind round glasses, and a combed-back mass of wavy black hair—who entered with such enthusiasm into Yale, this temple of knowledge, so severely flounder there? Why would this voracious student, craving intellectual debates, so confident in his abilities after his string of successes in Portland, Oregon, completely fail to find his place at this elite university? Why did the trajectory of Marcus Rothkowitz, who for the past eight years had been thrown into a dynamic, frenzied integration into American society—from Dvinsk to Portland—falter so easily at this point, in less than two years in New Haven, which would surely seem to have so much to offer him? Was it due to his youthful idealism and ingenuousness? To a matter of timing? Not just that. What, then, lay behind the dismal failures of his freshman and sophomore years at Yale?

Every bride is beautiful on her wedding day, the saying goes. But is she really? As it turns out, this was a matter of dispute between the two factions we often hear about in the Talmud, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. In chapter 2 of Tractate Ketubot, which Daf Yomi readers began this week, the rabbis discuss the proper ways to celebrate a wedding. This involves dancing, of course: “Rabbi Yehuda bar Elai would take a myrtle branch and dance before the bride,” while Rav Shmuel bar Rav Yitzchak would juggle three branches. Not everyone approved of a sage showing this much levity, even at a wedding, and Rabbi Zeira used to complain about the juggling, saying, “The old man is humiliating us.” But Zeira was proved wrong when Rav Shmuel bar Rav Yitzchak died, and a pillar of fire appeared before his corpse—a sign of divine favor that, the Talmud explains, occurs for only one or two men in a generation. Rabbi Zeira was forced to acknowledge that wild dancing at a wedding was a mitzvah: “His nonsense was effective for the old man,” he admitted.

Every bride is beautiful on her wedding day, the saying goes. But is she really? As it turns out, this was a matter of dispute between the two factions we often hear about in the Talmud, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. In chapter 2 of Tractate Ketubot, which Daf Yomi readers began this week, the rabbis discuss the proper ways to celebrate a wedding. This involves dancing, of course: “Rabbi Yehuda bar Elai would take a myrtle branch and dance before the bride,” while Rav Shmuel bar Rav Yitzchak would juggle three branches. Not everyone approved of a sage showing this much levity, even at a wedding, and Rabbi Zeira used to complain about the juggling, saying, “The old man is humiliating us.” But Zeira was proved wrong when Rav Shmuel bar Rav Yitzchak died, and a pillar of fire appeared before his corpse—a sign of divine favor that, the Talmud explains, occurs for only one or two men in a generation. Rabbi Zeira was forced to acknowledge that wild dancing at a wedding was a mitzvah: “His nonsense was effective for the old man,” he admitted.

Alex Reznik didn’t venture into the restaurant business with the intention of going kosher. Five years ago, when he was leading the kitchen at Ivan Kane’s Café Was, a treyf restaurant in Hollywood, Reznik could also be seen on TV cooking up bacon cheeseburgers on Top Chef.

Today, kosher food is Reznik’s main focus. He runs Ditmas, a kosher restaurant in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. And in less than six weeks, he plans to open up a second kosher eatery: Bedford Kitchen, in Flushing, Queens.

Alex Reznik didn’t venture into the restaurant business with the intention of going kosher. Five years ago, when he was leading the kitchen at Ivan Kane’s Café Was, a treyf restaurant in Hollywood, Reznik could also be seen on TV cooking up bacon cheeseburgers on Top Chef.

Today, kosher food is Reznik’s main focus. He runs Ditmas, a kosher restaurant in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. And in less than six weeks, he plans to open up a second kosher eatery: Bedford Kitchen, in Flushing, Queens.

Progressive American Jews complain a lot about Israel, privately and to one another. When it comes to the water cooler or dinner table conversation, we wring our hands and get frustrated. We blame the Orthodox or political extremists or continued settlement expansion. Or, even worse, we give up the conversation all together, preferring to tune out and avoid a tiring internal conflict.

But 2015 is different. This year, if you are part of the million-and-a-half person strong U.S. Reform movement, there is no excuse. There is no more blaming the polarizing coerciveness of the Chief Rabbinate or the lack of separation of religion and state in Israel. Because this year, you actually can have a say in the shape of Israel’s future. Before I elaborate, let’s consider the facts:

Progressive American Jews complain a lot about Israel, privately and to one another. When it comes to the water cooler or dinner table conversation, we wring our hands and get frustrated. We blame the Orthodox or political extremists or continued settlement expansion. Or, even worse, we give up the conversation all together, preferring to tune out and avoid a tiring internal conflict.

But 2015 is different. This year, if you are part of the million-and-a-half person strong U.S. Reform movement, there is no excuse. There is no more blaming the polarizing coerciveness of the Chief Rabbinate or the lack of separation of religion and state in Israel. Because this year, you actually can have a say in the shape of Israel’s future. Before I elaborate, let’s consider the facts:

Tablet columnist Marc Weitzmann was awarded the Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism at a ceremony today at Jewish Book Week in London. The £5,000 prize, named for the prolific British journalist and author who died in 1998, is awarded to writers whose work “furthers the understanding of contemporary life and Jewishness.” Weitzmann was cited for what the judges called his “unbelievably prescient” five-part series, “France’s Toxic Hate,” which appeared in Tablet last summer. In addition to Weitzmann, Tablet contributors Matti Friedman, Yair Rosenberg, and Batya Ungar-Sargon were also commended for outstanding work.

In accepting the award, Weitzmann, a Parisian and regular contributor to Le Monde, said that his series had been written “with a feeling of estrangement,” adding that, “for everyone in France, Jews are no longer French citizens—plain French—they are a ‘community,’ like the ‘Muslim Community.'” He stated that he is not writing about anti-Semitism, “I’m writing about France,” explaining that he sees a general reluctance to recognize anti-Semitism, and a dynamic that seeks to find a reason for the attacks on French Jewry that “puts the blame on each side.”

Tablet columnist Marc Weitzmann was awarded the Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism at a ceremony today at Jewish Book Week in London. The £5,000 prize, named for the prolific British journalist and author who died in 1998, is awarded to writers whose work “furthers the understanding of contemporary life and Jewishness.” Weitzmann was cited for what the judges called his “unbelievably prescient” five-part series, “France’s Toxic Hate,” which appeared in Tablet last summer. In addition to Weitzmann, Tablet contributors Matti Friedman, Yair Rosenberg, and Batya Ungar-Sargon were also commended for outstanding work.

In accepting the award, Weitzmann, a Parisian and regular contributor to Le Monde, said that his series had been written “with a feeling of estrangement,” adding that, “for everyone in France, Jews are no longer French citizens—plain French—they are a ‘community,’ like the ‘Muslim Community.'” He stated that he is not writing about anti-Semitism, “I’m writing about France,” explaining that he sees a general reluctance to recognize anti-Semitism, and a dynamic that seeks to find a reason for the attacks on French Jewry that “puts the blame on each side.”

A week after a volunteer guard was shot and killed at a synagogue in Denmark, members of Norway’s Muslim community formed a symbolic human chain in front of an Oslo Synagogue to protest recent anti-Jewish violence in Europe. On Saturday evening, more than 1,000 Norwegians of all faiths flooded Bergstien Street. The number had special symbolic resonance: It is roughly equal to that of Norway’s small Jewish community.

“The majority of us want to live in peace with each other,” said Mudassar Muddi Mehmood, one of the organizers of the vigil. “A small minority of haters on each side should not be allowed to set the agenda and define us as a community.”

A week after a volunteer guard was shot and killed at a synagogue in Denmark, members of Norway’s Muslim community formed a symbolic human chain in front of an Oslo Synagogue to protest recent anti-Jewish violence in Europe. On Saturday evening, more than 1,000 Norwegians of all faiths flooded Bergstien Street. The number had special symbolic resonance: It is roughly equal to that of Norway’s small Jewish community.

“The majority of us want to live in peace with each other,” said Mudassar Muddi Mehmood, one of the organizers of the vigil. “A small minority of haters on each side should not be allowed to set the agenda and define us as a community.”

Pity the young Iranian nuclear enthusiasts! Groaning under the weight of all those pesky sanctions, career-oriented nerds from Teheran or Isfahan eager to learn how to enrich uranium, say, or supervise reactor systems operations—all highly prized vocations in their bomb-happy theocracy—had very slim pickings when it came to increasing their nuclear-related knowledge stateside. No more: The University of Massachusetts Amherst announced last week that it was revising its approach to admissions and will no longer bar Iranian students from admission to nuclear science and engineering programs.

“This approach reflects the university’s longstanding commitment to wide access to educational opportunities,” offered Michael Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement, making a brave stand on behalf of the equal rights of students from terror-sponsoring countries with genocidal intentions bent on building nuclear weapons to pursue knowledge at federally-funded American research universities. “We have always believed that excluding students from admission conflicts with our institutional values and principles.”

Pity the young Iranian nuclear enthusiasts! Groaning under the weight of all those pesky sanctions, career-oriented nerds from Teheran or Isfahan eager to learn how to enrich uranium, say, or supervise reactor systems operations—all highly prized vocations in their bomb-happy theocracy—had very slim pickings when it came to increasing their nuclear-related knowledge stateside. No more: The University of Massachusetts Amherst announced last week that it was revising its approach to admissions and will no longer bar Iranian students from admission to nuclear science and engineering programs.

“This approach reflects the university’s longstanding commitment to wide access to educational opportunities,” offered Michael Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement, making a brave stand on behalf of the equal rights of students from terror-sponsoring countries with genocidal intentions bent on building nuclear weapons to pursue knowledge at federally-funded American research universities. “We have always believed that excluding students from admission conflicts with our institutional values and principles.”

Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Best Place on Earth: Stories, has been named the winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The $100,000 prize, which is one of the most generous literary awards, alternates between fiction and non-fiction yearly (last year’s nonfiction winner was Matti Friedman for his bookThe Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible). Kenneth Bonert, author of The Lion Seeker: A Novel, was named this year’s runner-up and will be awarded $25,000.

In Tsabari’s debut story collection, she explores Israeli history through characters of Mizrahi background—Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent—who are at the crossroads of nationalities, religions, and communities.

Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Best Place on Earth: Stories, has been named the winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The $100,000 prize, which is one of the most generous literary awards, alternates between fiction and non-fiction yearly (last year’s nonfiction winner was Matti Friedman for his bookThe Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible). Kenneth Bonert, author of The Lion Seeker: A Novel, was named this year’s runner-up and will be awarded $25,000.

In Tsabari’s debut story collection, she explores Israeli history through characters of Mizrahi background—Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent—who are at the crossroads of nationalities, religions, and communities.

It happened! Last night on Downton Abbey, Lady Rose MacClare, the glamorous carefree cousin to the Crawley clan (some might think of her as the adorable romper-clad Olivia to Lady Edith’s dolorous Vanessa Huxtable, but we’re not supposed to think about The Cosby Show anymore) liked her nice Jewish boyfriend Atticus Aldridge so much she put a ring on it, according to the laws of Moses and Israel. That’s right. House Grantham has added a full-blooded Jew to its roster (Cora, remember, is only half, and her quarter-Jewish daughters are probably rich and influential enough for the Nazis to give them only some cursory restrictions and otherwise leave them unmolested, which we all know is the test of whether someone is really Jewish or not: How the Nazis would have treated her.) It’s done. As far as I know, they’re consummating the ketubah right now, while we’re still listening to Neil Patrick Harris go on and on about his stupid fake Oscar predictions that nobody cares about.

Of course, this being Downton, the proceedings couldn’t go off quite as planned. There was the minor element of Anna being arrested for the murder of Mr. Green, the valet who raped her last season and was then unceremoniously thrown under a bus by “someone who is shorter than he was.” I’m looking forward to Anna’s monologue in The Exonerated one day (given that she is, you know, actually exonerated. Yikes.) And Lord Sinderby, Aldridge’s father, is not pleased that his son his marrying a “shiksa,” a word so awkwardly introduced to the Downton universe I wouldn’t have been surprised if a glossary chyron popped up at the end of the screen like on Sesame Street, and he has an oddly Roman Catholic disdain for divorce (so let us not speak of Shrimpy and Rose’s horrible mother please).

It happened! Last night on Downton Abbey, Lady Rose MacClare, the glamorous carefree cousin to the Crawley clan (some might think of her as the adorable romper-clad Olivia to Lady Edith’s dolorous Vanessa Huxtable, but we’re not supposed to think about The Cosby Show anymore) liked her nice Jewish boyfriend Atticus Aldridge so much she put a ring on it, according to the laws of Moses and Israel. That’s right. House Grantham has added a full-blooded Jew to its roster (Cora, remember, is only half, and her quarter-Jewish daughters are probably rich and influential enough for the Nazis to give them only some cursory restrictions and otherwise leave them unmolested, which we all know is the test of whether someone is really Jewish or not: How the Nazis would have treated her.) It’s done. As far as I know, they’re consummating the ketubah right now, while we’re still listening to Neil Patrick Harris go on and on about his stupid fake Oscar predictions that nobody cares about.

Of course, this being Downton, the proceedings couldn’t go off quite as planned. There was the minor element of Anna being arrested for the murder of Mr. Green, the valet who raped her last season and was then unceremoniously thrown under a bus by “someone who is shorter than he was.” I’m looking forward to Anna’s monologue in The Exonerated one day (given that she is, you know, actually exonerated. Yikes.) And Lord Sinderby, Aldridge’s father, is not pleased that his son his marrying a “shiksa,” a word so awkwardly introduced to the Downton universe I wouldn’t have been surprised if a glossary chyron popped up at the end of the screen like on Sesame Street, and he has an oddly Roman Catholic disdain for divorce (so let us not speak of Shrimpy and Rose’s horrible mother please).

Yesterday, in Jerusalem’s Tzahal Square, an ultra-Orthodox man was stabbed by an 18-year-old Palestinian. Video of the incident showed pedestrians running away from the scene as the assailant brandished his knife in their direction. But then, something unusual happened. Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, and his staff, who happened to be in the area on their way to a meeting at the municipality headquarters, subdued the attacker, with Barkat, a venture capitalist and former paratrooper in the Israeli army, tackling him to the ground–and then proceeding to direct traffic.

Watch the entire incident in the video below (Barkat is the one in the white shirt):

Yesterday, in Jerusalem’s Tzahal Square, an ultra-Orthodox man was stabbed by an 18-year-old Palestinian. Video of the incident showed pedestrians running away from the scene as the assailant brandished his knife in their direction. But then, something unusual happened. Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, and his staff, who happened to be in the area on their way to a meeting at the municipality headquarters, subdued the attacker, with Barkat, a venture capitalist and former paratrooper in the Israeli army, tackling him to the ground–and then proceeding to direct traffic.

Watch the entire incident in the video below (Barkat is the one in the white shirt):

Even though the Jewish population in Mumbai has declined dramatically over the past several decades—from a peak of 30,000 in the late 1940s to some 3,500 today, due in large part to mass aliyah—it is still the largest Jewish community in India. But for decades there was only one person in Mumbai, and the entire state of Maharashtra of which Mumbai is a part, who engraved Jewish tombstones: a devout Muslim named Muhammad Abdul Yassin.

On a recent visit, I found Yassin sitting in his cement hut on the southern end of Mumbai’s Jewish cemetery, surrounded by smooth marble and granite slabs—soon to be used for headstones—and the tools of his trade, hammers and chisels of various sizes. He stared out into the crammed cemetery, whose sidewalks have been narrowed to create more grave space over the last decade. The discernible dates on the headstones date back to the 1800s, though some of the graves, Yassin told me, date back earlier than that.

Even though the Jewish population in Mumbai has declined dramatically over the past several decades—from a peak of 30,000 in the late 1940s to some 3,500 today, due in large part to mass aliyah—it is still the largest Jewish community in India. But for decades there was only one person in Mumbai, and the entire state of Maharashtra of which Mumbai is a part, who engraved Jewish tombstones: a devout Muslim named Muhammad Abdul Yassin.

On a recent visit, I found Yassin sitting in his cement hut on the southern end of Mumbai’s Jewish cemetery, surrounded by smooth marble and granite slabs—soon to be used for headstones—and the tools of his trade, hammers and chisels of various sizes. He stared out into the crammed cemetery, whose sidewalks have been narrowed to create more grave space over the last decade. The discernible dates on the headstones date back to the 1800s, though some of the graves, Yassin told me, date back earlier than that.

I first learned about Cuban food as a young child: My Aunt Mildred and her husband Al, who worked for an American company, lived a golden life on the island until Fidel Castro’s revolution brought them back to the United States in 1959. They returned with exotic dishes like black bean soup, arroz con pollo (rice and chicken), and picadillo, a wonder of lightly spiced ground beef with olives and raisins.

The Jewish connection to Cuba started with three conversos who sailed with Christopher Columbus on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. But an established Jewish community did not form there until after the Spanish American War in 1898; a Reform synagogue opened a few years later. The 20th century brought many Jews fleeing Eastern Europe who could not get visas for the United States. Before the revolution, there were about 15,000 Jews in Havana; today there are fewer than 1,500.

I first learned about Cuban food as a young child: My Aunt Mildred and her husband Al, who worked for an American company, lived a golden life on the island until Fidel Castro’s revolution brought them back to the United States in 1959. They returned with exotic dishes like black bean soup, arroz con pollo (rice and chicken), and picadillo, a wonder of lightly spiced ground beef with olives and raisins.

The Jewish connection to Cuba started with three conversos who sailed with Christopher Columbus on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. But an established Jewish community did not form there until after the Spanish American War in 1898; a Reform synagogue opened a few years later. The 20th century brought many Jews fleeing Eastern Europe who could not get visas for the United States. Before the revolution, there were about 15,000 Jews in Havana; today there are fewer than 1,500.

“There’s no business like Shoah business” was a bitter pun I first heard in the late 1970s, working as intern at YIVO, an institution then primarily staffed by Holocaust survivors and their children. To some extent, Hollywood has agreed. Beginning with the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, there have been 22 Oscar nominees that, in one way or another represented the Holocaust, and since Shelley Winters won for Best Supporting Actress in 1959, 20 of these movies garnered at least one Academy Award.

Schindler’s List (1993) is the all-time champion, winning nine Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1993, but Cabaret won six in 1972, The Pianist won three in 2002, and Judgment at Nuremberg won two in 1961, while in a paroxysm of unexpected hipness, the Academy gave the award for Best Original Screenplay to The Producers (1982). Meryl Streep won her second Oscar for Sophie’s Choice (1982) in which she played a Polish victim. Adrian Brody and Shelley Winters are the only actors to have won Academy Awards for playing a Jewish character in a Holocaust-themed movie, although Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz received Oscars for their respective roles as an SS guard and an SS commandant in The Reader (2008) and Inglorious Basterds (2009).

“There’s no business like Shoah business” was a bitter pun I first heard in the late 1970s, working as intern at YIVO, an institution then primarily staffed by Holocaust survivors and their children. To some extent, Hollywood has agreed. Beginning with the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, there have been 22 Oscar nominees that, in one way or another represented the Holocaust, and since Shelley Winters won for Best Supporting Actress in 1959, 20 of these movies garnered at least one Academy Award.

Schindler’s List (1993) is the all-time champion, winning nine Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1993, but Cabaret won six in 1972, The Pianist won three in 2002, and Judgment at Nuremberg won two in 1961, while in a paroxysm of unexpected hipness, the Academy gave the award for Best Original Screenplay to The Producers (1982). Meryl Streep won her second Oscar for Sophie’s Choice (1982) in which she played a Polish victim. Adrian Brody and Shelley Winters are the only actors to have won Academy Awards for playing a Jewish character in a Holocaust-themed movie, although Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz received Oscars for their respective roles as an SS guard and an SS commandant in The Reader (2008) and Inglorious Basterds (2009).

The kids were all pointing to their shoes and smiling. Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Under-14 team had just dropped its third game of the week, this one a 52-38 loss to Harlem’s Thurgood Marshall Academy, but wins and losses were what the weekend was about.

Officially, they had come to New York City to take place in the Gatorade Battle of the Boroughs tournament. For Maccabi, though, the exhibition, which was organized by the NBA and held at Baruch College in conjunction with All Star weekend, was more about opportunities, for both the players and the club.

The kids were all pointing to their shoes and smiling. Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Under-14 team had just dropped its third game of the week, this one a 52-38 loss to Harlem’s Thurgood Marshall Academy, but wins and losses were what the weekend was about.

Officially, they had come to New York City to take place in the Gatorade Battle of the Boroughs tournament. For Maccabi, though, the exhibition, which was organized by the NBA and held at Baruch College in conjunction with All Star weekend, was more about opportunities, for both the players and the club.

In October 1943, Adolf Hitler tried to kill my entire family, simply because they were Jewish. He did not succeed, because kind and caring Danes warned, hid, and evacuated my grandfather, grandmother, and then-5-year-old father to safety in Sweden.

On February 15, 2015, a 22-year old Danish-born self-described radical Muslim tried to kill what is left of my father’s family. Simply because they are Jewish. He did not succeed, because of the sacrifice of an unarmed Jewish volunteer security guard and two policemen.

In October 1943, Adolf Hitler tried to kill my entire family, simply because they were Jewish. He did not succeed, because kind and caring Danes warned, hid, and evacuated my grandfather, grandmother, and then-5-year-old father to safety in Sweden.

On February 15, 2015, a 22-year old Danish-born self-described radical Muslim tried to kill what is left of my father’s family. Simply because they are Jewish. He did not succeed, because of the sacrifice of an unarmed Jewish volunteer security guard and two policemen.

I was sitting on the couch late last night, watching Seinfeld, mindlessly scrolling through my Facebook feed, when a post caught my eye. “Really really sad about Harris Wittels,” someone had written. She’d linked to an old tweet of his; hilarious and dorky wordplay, impossible not to smile at.

I was sitting on the couch late last night, watching Seinfeld, mindlessly scrolling through my Facebook feed, when a post caught my eye. “Really really sad about Harris Wittels,” someone had written. She’d linked to an old tweet of his; hilarious and dorky wordplay, impossible not to smile at.

The Oscars are upon us! The stylists are all agog! The intersection of Hollywood and Highland is even more impassable than usual! And while it’s disconcerting how they creep up on us ever since the powers that be moved them up a month (remember how they used to be at the end of March? What happened to that? Were they worried about cutting into the important April Fool’s Day market?), they remain our just reward for sitting through the Super Bowl earlier this month.

So what can we expect? Here’s your mini-guide to sounding like you know what you’re talking about at your viewing party.

The Oscars are upon us! The stylists are all agog! The intersection of Hollywood and Highland is even more impassable than usual! And while it’s disconcerting how they creep up on us ever since the powers that be moved them up a month (remember how they used to be at the end of March? What happened to that? Were they worried about cutting into the important April Fool’s Day market?), they remain our just reward for sitting through the Super Bowl earlier this month.

So what can we expect? Here’s your mini-guide to sounding like you know what you’re talking about at your viewing party.

I rounded the corner and started examining the London townhouses, knowing the one I sought would be devoid of markers announcing any Jewish presence. Finally spotting the synagogue, I went to climb the stairs when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw two men in dark coats cross the street and call to me. I knew who they were and what they wanted.

I rounded the corner and started examining the London townhouses, knowing the one I sought would be devoid of markers announcing any Jewish presence. Finally spotting the synagogue, I went to climb the stairs when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw two men in dark coats cross the street and call to me. I knew who they were and what they wanted.

It’s a strange feeling to meet someone for the first time and know that they’re going to die. That’s what happened with Michael Golomb.

A few months ago, a listener wrote to tell us about his uncle, Michael, and urged us to interview him before cancer got the best of him. “He’s a really special guy,” he said, “and you’ll want to hear his story.” Needless to say, we were nervous when we called up with a chutzpadik request: that he devote a few of his last moments to us, so that we could tell his story.

It’s a strange feeling to meet someone for the first time and know that they’re going to die. That’s what happened with Michael Golomb.

A few months ago, a listener wrote to tell us about his uncle, Michael, and urged us to interview him before cancer got the best of him. “He’s a really special guy,” he said, “and you’ll want to hear his story.” Needless to say, we were nervous when we called up with a chutzpadik request: that he devote a few of his last moments to us, so that we could tell his story.

Hamilton, which opened at the Public Theater this week, tells the story of the founding father and ten-dollar-bill-centerfold as vibrant, living history. Tony-winning songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda also stars in his work about the life of Alexander Hamilton, telling what he describes as the story of an immigrant. To speak to the experiences of a man born and raised in the Caribbean, the musical features Miranda’s unique blend of hip-hop and show tunes, and the cast is almost entirely actors of color. Early buzz is overwhelminglypositive.

Something the musical doesn’t explore is the founding father’s early connections to Judaism, and the much speculated-about possibility that Hamilton had Jewish roots himself. Though the claim of Jewish heritage remains largely unsubstantiated, Hamilton certainly had close relationships with Jews from a young age.

Hamilton, which opened at the Public Theater this week, tells the story of the founding father and ten-dollar-bill-centerfold as vibrant, living history. Tony-winning songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda also stars in his work about the life of Alexander Hamilton, telling what he describes as the story of an immigrant. To speak to the experiences of a man born and raised in the Caribbean, the musical features Miranda’s unique blend of hip-hop and show tunes, and the cast is almost entirely actors of color. Early buzz is overwhelminglypositive.

Something the musical doesn’t explore is the founding father’s early connections to Judaism, and the much speculated-about possibility that Hamilton had Jewish roots himself. Though the claim of Jewish heritage remains largely unsubstantiated, Hamilton certainly had close relationships with Jews from a young age.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/scroll/189128/alexander-hamiltons-jewish-connection/feed0Why Every Jewish Man, Woman, and Child in Europe Should Get a Gunhttp://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189100/arming-europes-jews
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189100/arming-europes-jews#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 05:00:27 +0000Liel Leibovitzhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=189100

Ever since I heard the horrible news from Copenhagen this weekend I’ve been haunted by one persistent thought. I was thinking about Dan Uzan, the 37-year-old volunteer who was shot in the head as he stood outside his local synagogue on a frigid night to make sure that inside a young girl and her family could celebrate the girl’s bat mitzvah in peace. I tried to imagine what his last moments might’ve looked like as he saw Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, the alleged gunman, approaching. And then I had one more thought, more urgent than the others: What if Uzan had been armed? What if he at least had a chance, as he stared down the barrel of a gun, to draw his own and shoot first? What if the shoppers in Paris’ kosher supermarket packed heat when Amedy Coulibaly walked in? If Ilan Halimi had a pistol, would we know his name today?

Arming Europe’s Jews against the jihadi psychos who are trying to kill them for is not the sort of proposition that decent, liberal people like to entertain. Decent, liberal people believe in reasonable measures. Sadly, the savages who shot Uzan do not. Nor do the beasts who twice attacked a synagogue south of Stockholm last summer, or the lowlifes who desecrated hundreds of Jewish graves in France earlier this week. Nor did Mohammed Merah, who shot up a Jewish school in Toulouse so he could upload a video of himself killing Jewish children as they screamed in terror.

Ever since I heard the horrible news from Copenhagen this weekend I’ve been haunted by one persistent thought. I was thinking about Dan Uzan, the 37-year-old volunteer who was shot in the head as he stood outside his local synagogue on a frigid night to make sure that inside a young girl and her family could celebrate the girl’s bat mitzvah in peace. I tried to imagine what his last moments might’ve looked like as he saw Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, the alleged gunman, approaching. And then I had one more thought, more urgent than the others: What if Uzan had been armed? What if he at least had a chance, as he stared down the barrel of a gun, to draw his own and shoot first? What if the shoppers in Paris’ kosher supermarket packed heat when Amedy Coulibaly walked in? If Ilan Halimi had a pistol, would we know his name today?

Arming Europe’s Jews against the jihadi psychos who are trying to kill them for is not the sort of proposition that decent, liberal people like to entertain. Decent, liberal people believe in reasonable measures. Sadly, the savages who shot Uzan do not. Nor do the beasts who twice attacked a synagogue south of Stockholm last summer, or the lowlifes who desecrated hundreds of Jewish graves in France earlier this week. Nor did Mohammed Merah, who shot up a Jewish school in Toulouse so he could upload a video of himself killing Jewish children as they screamed in terror.

It’s Shabbat in Sugar Land, and dozens of rabid Texans are clanging cowbells to the tune of “Bad Boys,” the theme song from Cops, as three referees skate gracefully around the ice. Tonight, the first 45 fans at the entrance to the Sugar Land Ice and Sports Center were rewarded with free cowbells—black ones with the Imperials’ logo. Along one side of the arena are five rows of blue bleachers occupied by fans bundled up under coats and blankets. On the opposite end, behind the team’s benches, stand the coaches, in business suits. Giant flags of the United States and Texas hang beside a scoreboard behind one of the nets.

Filing onto the ice now on this cool November night are the hometown Imperials, wearing camouflage jerseys in support of the U.S. military.

It’s Shabbat in Sugar Land, and dozens of rabid Texans are clanging cowbells to the tune of “Bad Boys,” the theme song from Cops, as three referees skate gracefully around the ice. Tonight, the first 45 fans at the entrance to the Sugar Land Ice and Sports Center were rewarded with free cowbells—black ones with the Imperials’ logo. Along one side of the arena are five rows of blue bleachers occupied by fans bundled up under coats and blankets. On the opposite end, behind the team’s benches, stand the coaches, in business suits. Giant flags of the United States and Texas hang beside a scoreboard behind one of the nets.

Filing onto the ice now on this cool November night are the hometown Imperials, wearing camouflage jerseys in support of the U.S. military.

Lest the depressing news of a surge in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe cause you to forget other hubs of anti-Jewish zeal, the New York Times has a report on the last Jews of Yemen, who are living under near house arrest and who endure taunts and attacks for their beliefs and practices.

Reporter Rob Norland visited the country’s two remaining communities—in the cities of Raida and Sana—and found their members face constant verbal and physical assault. Anti-Semitism is a “central plank” of the ideology of Houthi militants who control the region, Norland writes, and whose slogan—“Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews”—is chanted at rallies, painted on walls, broadcast over the airwaves.

Lest the depressing news of a surge in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe cause you to forget other hubs of anti-Jewish zeal, the New York Times has a report on the last Jews of Yemen, who are living under near house arrest and who endure taunts and attacks for their beliefs and practices.

Reporter Rob Norland visited the country’s two remaining communities—in the cities of Raida and Sana—and found their members face constant verbal and physical assault. Anti-Semitism is a “central plank” of the ideology of Houthi militants who control the region, Norland writes, and whose slogan—“Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews”—is chanted at rallies, painted on walls, broadcast over the airwaves.

Barry Freundel, the prominent Washington, D.C., rabbi arrested in October 2014 for allegedly filming more than 100 women using the mikvah adjacent to the synagogue he led for several decades, pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism today. The Washington Jewish Week, which has covered the disturbing local case as it unfolded, reports that the disgraced former spiritual leader of high-profile Modern Orthodox D.C. synagogue Kesher Israel faces up to 52 years in prison for the crimes.

During the hearing, Freundel appeared red-faced and kept his head bowed low and made no eye contact with more than a dozen victims who packed the second-floor courtroom.

Barry Freundel, the prominent Washington, D.C., rabbi arrested in October 2014 for allegedly filming more than 100 women using the mikvah adjacent to the synagogue he led for several decades, pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism today. The Washington Jewish Week, which has covered the disturbing local case as it unfolded, reports that the disgraced former spiritual leader of high-profile Modern Orthodox D.C. synagogue Kesher Israel faces up to 52 years in prison for the crimes.

During the hearing, Freundel appeared red-faced and kept his head bowed low and made no eye contact with more than a dozen victims who packed the second-floor courtroom.

Victoria Hanna recently released a music video that’s absolutely mesmerizing. In it, the Jerusalem-born singer stands, primly dressed, at the head of a class chanting the Hebrew alphabet. With the utterance of each letter, she makes a different gesture, as if she’s teaching some kind of secret language. Then a hip-hop beat kicks in and the music and movements grow wilder.

Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin paid Hanna a visit to find out more about what the video is all about.

Victoria Hanna recently released a music video that’s absolutely mesmerizing. In it, the Jerusalem-born singer stands, primly dressed, at the head of a class chanting the Hebrew alphabet. With the utterance of each letter, she makes a different gesture, as if she’s teaching some kind of secret language. Then a hip-hop beat kicks in and the music and movements grow wilder.

Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin paid Hanna a visit to find out more about what the video is all about.

Here’s where I cried in Oliver Sacks’s New York Timesessay about learning he has terminal cancer: “I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people—even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.”

He gives us a gift—a perspective that we’d be wise to co-opt, or at least be made to recall daily. No matter how long, your time may feel short. Spend your days on what is essential to you. And if reading is part of that mandate—make Sacks’ essay (and his books, too, for that matter), part of your life now.

Here’s where I cried in Oliver Sacks’s New York Timesessay about learning he has terminal cancer: “I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people—even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.”

He gives us a gift—a perspective that we’d be wise to co-opt, or at least be made to recall daily. No matter how long, your time may feel short. Spend your days on what is essential to you. And if reading is part of that mandate—make Sacks’ essay (and his books, too, for that matter), part of your life now.

For those of us who have worked at all in network television (and even those who merely follow it intently) there’s a sort of Holy Grail of series that in this world of diversified entertainment seems increasingly unattainable: a prime-time network drama that is a) actually good, b) not a Law & Order/CSI/SVU spinoff or other procedural of any kind, c) a big fat genuine giant hit. The road to cancellation is paved with noble efforts (Smash, Red Band Society, a large number of other shows with which I didn’t have personal involvement) that somehow went wrong, which is why it’s so satisfying—and envy-inducing—when a big, audacious, original show comes along and finally makes it work (and also makes its audience actually sit through the commercials. Let’s remember who keeps the light on, people.)

That show, my friends, is Empire. And if you’re not watching it, you’re insane.

For those of us who have worked at all in network television (and even those who merely follow it intently) there’s a sort of Holy Grail of series that in this world of diversified entertainment seems increasingly unattainable: a prime-time network drama that is a) actually good, b) not a Law & Order/CSI/SVU spinoff or other procedural of any kind, c) a big fat genuine giant hit. The road to cancellation is paved with noble efforts (Smash, Red Band Society, a large number of other shows with which I didn’t have personal involvement) that somehow went wrong, which is why it’s so satisfying—and envy-inducing—when a big, audacious, original show comes along and finally makes it work (and also makes its audience actually sit through the commercials. Let’s remember who keeps the light on, people.)

That show, my friends, is Empire. And if you’re not watching it, you’re insane.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/scroll/189104/empire-is-tvs-most-ambitious-new-drama/feed0Video Shows What It's Like to Walk Around Paris as a Jewhttp://tabletmag.com/scroll/189101/video-walking-around-paris-as-a-jew
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/189101/video-walking-around-paris-as-a-jew#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 15:32:46 +0000Stephanie Butnickhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=189101

Israeli journalist Zvika Klein filmed an interesting experiment: walking through Paris for 10 hours as a visibly identifiable Jew. With a bodyguard for protection and an accomplice several steps ahead filming with a hidden camera in his backpack, Klein set out in his yarmulke and tzitzit. As he describes the day, “We started walking – first through the quieter quarters of the city, across from the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees, and the Jewish neighborhoods, and later through the mostly Muslim neighborhoods.” The tourist spots were “relatively calm,” but in other areas he received stares, utterances of “Juif,” and in one instance appears to be spit on.

It’s a troubling video, and seeing anti-Jewish sentiment so casually flung at Klein in the wake of last month’s deadly siege at a Paris kosher supermarket as well as the Charlie Hebdomassacre is nothing short of disturbing. When a young boy yells “Viva Palestine,” the immediate connection between “Jewish” and “Israel” is made vividly clear.

Israeli journalist Zvika Klein filmed an interesting experiment: walking through Paris for 10 hours as a visibly identifiable Jew. With a bodyguard for protection and an accomplice several steps ahead filming with a hidden camera in his backpack, Klein set out in his yarmulke and tzitzit. As he describes the day, “We started walking – first through the quieter quarters of the city, across from the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees, and the Jewish neighborhoods, and later through the mostly Muslim neighborhoods.” The tourist spots were “relatively calm,” but in other areas he received stares, utterances of “Juif,” and in one instance appears to be spit on.

It’s a troubling video, and seeing anti-Jewish sentiment so casually flung at Klein in the wake of last month’s deadly siege at a Paris kosher supermarket as well as the Charlie Hebdomassacre is nothing short of disturbing. When a young boy yells “Viva Palestine,” the immediate connection between “Jewish” and “Israel” is made vividly clear.

Tablet Magazine’s Matthew Fishbane likes to find Jews far from home. He’s reported from Venezuela, the Solomon Islands, and Uganda. His latest assignment took him to Manipur, India, where people from disparate hill tribes who identify themselves as Jewish—and who are known as the Bnei Menashe—prepared to make aliyah. Fishbane was there shadowing Michael Freund, an Orthodox Jew who is something of a savior to these people and who has spent 17 years working to bring hidden Jews and descendants of Lost Tribes back into the fold.

Fishbane joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss what drives Freund, how members of previous migrations of Bnei Menashe have fared in their new home, and the geopolitical implications of Freund’s activity.

Tablet Magazine’s Matthew Fishbane likes to find Jews far from home. He’s reported from Venezuela, the Solomon Islands, and Uganda. His latest assignment took him to Manipur, India, where people from disparate hill tribes who identify themselves as Jewish—and who are known as the Bnei Menashe—prepared to make aliyah. Fishbane was there shadowing Michael Freund, an Orthodox Jew who is something of a savior to these people and who has spent 17 years working to bring hidden Jews and descendants of Lost Tribes back into the fold.

Fishbane joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss what drives Freund, how members of previous migrations of Bnei Menashe have fared in their new home, and the geopolitical implications of Freund’s activity.

Last weekend, Fifty Shades of Grey opened in wide release (write your own joke here), and critics have had fun snarking about how god-awful the movie and books are. Many have also criticized the fact that Fifty Shades began as Twilight fanfiction—an alternate-universe (AU) version of those novels-and-movies’ characters Bella and Edward, in which clumsy high-schooler Bella has become awkward college-student Ana and sparkly bloodsucking Edward has become flogger-waving billionaire dickhead Christian.

Fifty Shades, the book, is terrible. The writing is abysmal—“My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm” (wait, who is doing what now?)—and the story presents an abusive, stalker-ish relationship as desirable. But it’s unfortunate that sneering at Fifty Shades has expanded, like a black hole of snark and bitchery, into dismissal of all fanfiction as ben-wa-ball-yanking blather.

Last weekend, Fifty Shades of Grey opened in wide release (write your own joke here), and critics have had fun snarking about how god-awful the movie and books are. Many have also criticized the fact that Fifty Shades began as Twilight fanfiction—an alternate-universe (AU) version of those novels-and-movies’ characters Bella and Edward, in which clumsy high-schooler Bella has become awkward college-student Ana and sparkly bloodsucking Edward has become flogger-waving billionaire dickhead Christian.

Fifty Shades, the book, is terrible. The writing is abysmal—“My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm” (wait, who is doing what now?)—and the story presents an abusive, stalker-ish relationship as desirable. But it’s unfortunate that sneering at Fifty Shades has expanded, like a black hole of snark and bitchery, into dismissal of all fanfiction as ben-wa-ball-yanking blather.

In the spring of 1997, shortly after Israel pulled out of its settlements in Hebron, Michael Freund was working at the communications bureau of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then serving his first stint in that office. The Diaspora Affairs adviser at the time worked across the hall, where mail to the cabinet was handled. The adviser and Freund kept what they jokingly referred to as “The Crazy File”: letters from across the globe from people who believed that they were the Messiah or who made oddball requests of the government. These were sometimes illegible, sometimes threatening, sometimes naïve and amusing.

One day, a secretary handed Freund a beat-up orange envelope, addressed to the Prime Minster of Israel. Freund opened it. The letter inside had been sent by the leadership of a community in Manipur, in Northeast India, which claimed to be a lost tribe of the biblical people of Israel. The rest of the letter was a simply worded plea to be allowed to come back to the land of their ancestors after 2,700 years in exile. They had written to Golda Meir and every prime minister since then but had never gotten an answer. Why not?

In the spring of 1997, shortly after Israel pulled out of its settlements in Hebron, Michael Freund was working at the communications bureau of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then serving his first stint in that office. The Diaspora Affairs adviser at the time worked across the hall, where mail to the cabinet was handled. The adviser and Freund kept what they jokingly referred to as “The Crazy File”: letters from across the globe from people who believed that they were the Messiah or who made oddball requests of the government. These were sometimes illegible, sometimes threatening, sometimes naïve and amusing.

One day, a secretary handed Freund a beat-up orange envelope, addressed to the Prime Minster of Israel. Freund opened it. The letter inside had been sent by the leadership of a community in Manipur, in Northeast India, which claimed to be a lost tribe of the biblical people of Israel. The rest of the letter was a simply worded plea to be allowed to come back to the land of their ancestors after 2,700 years in exile. They had written to Golda Meir and every prime minister since then but had never gotten an answer. Why not?

After two hours of heated debate, the University of Toledo student government threw out a controversial resolution urging the university to divest from companies linked to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories Tuesday night. The resolution, backed by UT Students for Justice in Palestine, called on the university to divest from funds that invest in companies that “provide direct support for and directly profit from Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories,” including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Procter and Gamble. The resolution cited as precedent UT’s divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Toledo Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo condemned the resolution. A statement released by Hillel raised concerns that the measure would create “hostility against the small Jewish community at UT.” SJP members said their campaign did not target Jewish students or Israel as a whole, stressing that the companies they identified for divestment are not Israeli.

After two hours of heated debate, the University of Toledo student government threw out a controversial resolution urging the university to divest from companies linked to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories Tuesday night. The resolution, backed by UT Students for Justice in Palestine, called on the university to divest from funds that invest in companies that “provide direct support for and directly profit from Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories,” including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Procter and Gamble. The resolution cited as precedent UT’s divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Toledo Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo condemned the resolution. A statement released by Hillel raised concerns that the measure would create “hostility against the small Jewish community at UT.” SJP members said their campaign did not target Jewish students or Israel as a whole, stressing that the companies they identified for divestment are not Israeli.

Billy Eichner, the lovably high-octane comedian behind Fuse’s man-on-the-street game show Billy on the Street, traded his usual New York City backdrop for the nation’s capital this week. In a segment dreamed up by one of the youngs on staff at the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama and Big Bird appeared as contestants on the show, discussing their Eat Brighter campaign to encourage healthy eating among children.

Eichner, whose style Siân Gibby described last year as “totally in-your-face and outrageous and completely brilliant,” toned down his usual frenzied shtick a bit for FLOTUS and Big Bird—there was still yelling, of course, but it was more near Obama than at Obama. To his credit, Eichner did get the First Lady to wheel him around a grocery story in a shopping cart.

Billy Eichner, the lovably high-octane comedian behind Fuse’s man-on-the-street game show Billy on the Street, traded his usual New York City backdrop for the nation’s capital this week. In a segment dreamed up by one of the youngs on staff at the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama and Big Bird appeared as contestants on the show, discussing their Eat Brighter campaign to encourage healthy eating among children.

Eichner, whose style Siân Gibby described last year as “totally in-your-face and outrageous and completely brilliant,” toned down his usual frenzied shtick a bit for FLOTUS and Big Bird—there was still yelling, of course, but it was more near Obama than at Obama. To his credit, Eichner did get the First Lady to wheel him around a grocery story in a shopping cart.

There have been many reactions to the recent deadly violence against Jews in European capitals, from Paris to Copenhagen. Some have expressed solidarity with the Jewish community. Others have worked to reaffirm the European values of tolerance and pluralism. And then there’s Helena Groll, a presenter on Sweden’s public broadcast Sveriges Radio, who suggested yesterday that Jews are to blame for their own persecution.

In an interview with Isaac Bachman, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Groll asked: “Do the Jews themselves have any responsibility in the growing anti-Semitism that we see now?” Bachman, naturally, was taken aback. “I reject the question altogether,” he said. “The question of how a woman contributes to the fact of being raped is irrelevant altogether. I don’t think there is any provocation that Jews are doing–they just exist.”

There have been many reactions to the recent deadly violence against Jews in European capitals, from Paris to Copenhagen. Some have expressed solidarity with the Jewish community. Others have worked to reaffirm the European values of tolerance and pluralism. And then there’s Helena Groll, a presenter on Sweden’s public broadcast Sveriges Radio, who suggested yesterday that Jews are to blame for their own persecution.

In an interview with Isaac Bachman, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Groll asked: “Do the Jews themselves have any responsibility in the growing anti-Semitism that we see now?” Bachman, naturally, was taken aback. “I reject the question altogether,” he said. “The question of how a woman contributes to the fact of being raped is irrelevant altogether. I don’t think there is any provocation that Jews are doing–they just exist.”

A hideous video titled “The Eternal Jew” was posted on YouTube this weekend, and, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 100,000 times. The video, created by the Samaria Citizens Committee, a far-right settler group in Israel, is an obscene, crudely anti-Semitic defamation straight out of the Nazi Jew-baiter-in-chief Julius Streicher’s notorious pornographic tabloid, Der Stürmer.

Indeed, a Stürmer-like caricature of a Jew—long-nosed, groveling, and money-grubbing—appears in the video as the obedient acolyte/agent of one “Herr Stürmer,” who pays his employee to engage in anti-Israel acts. The video ends with the image of the Jewish traitor—for that is how the Jew in the clip is depicted—hanged alongside the logos of Peace Now, B’Tselem, and other Israeli groups committed to Israeli-Palestinian cooperation and interaction and an Arab-Israeli peace process. “The Europeans may seem different to you,” a deep voice intones, “but to them you are exactly the same.” In other words, the twisted masterminds behind this abomination are accusing dovish Israeli groups and like-minded Jews of being in the employ of European anti-Semites, and not-so-subtly implying that members of these groups deserve to die.

A hideous video titled “The Eternal Jew” was posted on YouTube this weekend, and, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 100,000 times. The video, created by the Samaria Citizens Committee, a far-right settler group in Israel, is an obscene, crudely anti-Semitic defamation straight out of the Nazi Jew-baiter-in-chief Julius Streicher’s notorious pornographic tabloid, Der Stürmer.

Indeed, a Stürmer-like caricature of a Jew—long-nosed, groveling, and money-grubbing—appears in the video as the obedient acolyte/agent of one “Herr Stürmer,” who pays his employee to engage in anti-Israel acts. The video ends with the image of the Jewish traitor—for that is how the Jew in the clip is depicted—hanged alongside the logos of Peace Now, B’Tselem, and other Israeli groups committed to Israeli-Palestinian cooperation and interaction and an Arab-Israeli peace process. “The Europeans may seem different to you,” a deep voice intones, “but to them you are exactly the same.” In other words, the twisted masterminds behind this abomination are accusing dovish Israeli groups and like-minded Jews of being in the employ of European anti-Semites, and not-so-subtly implying that members of these groups deserve to die.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is up for re-election in March and is facing harsh criticism over his upcoming speech to Congress, found himself in the midst of yet another scandal this week. Israel’s State Comptroller released a scathing report Tuesday with the findings of a much-anticipated probe into the Netanyahu family’s spending between 2010 to 2012. The report found that the spending at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem as well as the family’s home in Caesarea was disproportionately excessive.

Shapira also announced he suspected foul play regarding the so-called Bottlegate scandal, as well as controversial allegations that the Netanyahu family purchased furniture for their private home in Caesarea with state funds intended for use at the official residence in Jerusalem.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is up for re-election in March and is facing harsh criticism over his upcoming speech to Congress, found himself in the midst of yet another scandal this week. Israel’s State Comptroller released a scathing report Tuesday with the findings of a much-anticipated probe into the Netanyahu family’s spending between 2010 to 2012. The report found that the spending at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem as well as the family’s home in Caesarea was disproportionately excessive.

Shapira also announced he suspected foul play regarding the so-called Bottlegate scandal, as well as controversial allegations that the Netanyahu family purchased furniture for their private home in Caesarea with state funds intended for use at the official residence in Jerusalem.

Stefan Zweig’s lapidary and marvelously crafted story “Mendel the Bibliophile” is an archetypically elegiac exercise in nostalgia for a passing epoch. As much as anything else that he wrote it is a pure distillation of Zweigian sensibility and concerns. The story’s anonymous protagonist is a cipher for the humanist writer: a melancholy and sensitive old-world gentleman of impeccably liberal discernment, taste, and class-transcending curiosity. One evening he finds himself caught out in a thunderstorm in a distant suburb of Vienna that he has not visited in many years. Drenched, he ducks into a shopworn café where he is abruptly struck by a recollection of times past, when many years earlier, a side table in this shabby café was a kind of de facto office for a remarkably monomaniacal character.

Stefan Zweig’s lapidary and marvelously crafted story “Mendel the Bibliophile” is an archetypically elegiac exercise in nostalgia for a passing epoch. As much as anything else that he wrote it is a pure distillation of Zweigian sensibility and concerns. The story’s anonymous protagonist is a cipher for the humanist writer: a melancholy and sensitive old-world gentleman of impeccably liberal discernment, taste, and class-transcending curiosity. One evening he finds himself caught out in a thunderstorm in a distant suburb of Vienna that he has not visited in many years. Drenched, he ducks into a shopworn café where he is abruptly struck by a recollection of times past, when many years earlier, a side table in this shabby café was a kind of de facto office for a remarkably monomaniacal character.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/189017/chimen-abramsky/feed0Obama Is Taking Out the Failure of His Iran Policy on Its Opponentshttp://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189040/the-white-house-freak-out
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189040/the-white-house-freak-out#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 05:00:10 +0000Lee Smithhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=189040

It’s hard not to conclude that the White House’s Iran policy is being run by a gaggle of catty teenagers. How else can you explain a smear campaign of personal attacks and insinuations broadcast through friendly reporters and Twitter to discuss a serious policy issue that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people and the national security of the United States?

In just the last few months, an unnamed White House aide described the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu as “chickenshit” then attacked Netanyahu, falsely, for violating “protocol” when he accepted an invitation from speaker of the House John Boehner to deliver an address before Congress. The White House is equally quick to slime Democrats with whom it disagrees. Just last month, the president himself personally accused Sen. Robert Menendez of being beholden to moneyed interests. According to the leader of his party, the New Jersey legislator wants to impose sanctions on Iran not out of a firm conviction that the Islamic Republic is a threat to American citizens, interests, and allies, born of 20 years of experience in the Senate, but because of pressure from “donors and others.”

It’s hard not to conclude that the White House’s Iran policy is being run by a gaggle of catty teenagers. How else can you explain a smear campaign of personal attacks and insinuations broadcast through friendly reporters and Twitter to discuss a serious policy issue that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people and the national security of the United States?

In just the last few months, an unnamed White House aide described the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu as “chickenshit” then attacked Netanyahu, falsely, for violating “protocol” when he accepted an invitation from speaker of the House John Boehner to deliver an address before Congress. The White House is equally quick to slime Democrats with whom it disagrees. Just last month, the president himself personally accused Sen. Robert Menendez of being beholden to moneyed interests. According to the leader of his party, the New Jersey legislator wants to impose sanctions on Iran not out of a firm conviction that the Islamic Republic is a threat to American citizens, interests, and allies, born of 20 years of experience in the Senate, but because of pressure from “donors and others.”

This past Shabbat morning, over 30 families in Madison, Wisconsin, awoke to find anti-Semitic and racist graffiti covering their homes, garages, and driveways.

“I got up and pulled aside my bedroom curtain, and there on my neighbors’ house was ‘Fuck Jews,’ ” James Stein, professor in cardiovascular research at the University of Wisconsin School and president of the Jewish Federation of Madison, told me in a telephone interview. “I went outside and saw that my car had been vandalized. Shortly afterward we found out that a house a quarter-mile away had a swastika on the garage door and a house a block down had a ‘KKK’ and a confederate flag.” Other homes were spray-painted with penises, racist slurs, and various and sundry obscenities.

This past Shabbat morning, over 30 families in Madison, Wisconsin, awoke to find anti-Semitic and racist graffiti covering their homes, garages, and driveways.

“I got up and pulled aside my bedroom curtain, and there on my neighbors’ house was ‘Fuck Jews,’ ” James Stein, professor in cardiovascular research at the University of Wisconsin School and president of the Jewish Federation of Madison, told me in a telephone interview. “I went outside and saw that my car had been vandalized. Shortly afterward we found out that a house a quarter-mile away had a swastika on the garage door and a house a block down had a ‘KKK’ and a confederate flag.” Other homes were spray-painted with penises, racist slurs, and various and sundry obscenities.

New York Knicks power forward Amar’e Stoudemire is leaving New York after five seasons with the team to play for the Dallas Mavericks. The Hapoel Jerusalem part-owner, who is reportedly in the process of obtaining Israeli citizenship, negotiated a buyout with the Knicks and then signed a $477,150 deal with the Mavs, starting immediately.

“Although I leave the Knicks with a heavy heart, I wish the organization the best of luck,” Stoudemire said in a statement. “Once a Knick always a Knick.”

New York Knicks power forward Amar’e Stoudemire is leaving New York after five seasons with the team to play for the Dallas Mavericks. The Hapoel Jerusalem part-owner, who is reportedly in the process of obtaining Israeli citizenship, negotiated a buyout with the Knicks and then signed a $477,150 deal with the Mavs, starting immediately.

“Although I leave the Knicks with a heavy heart, I wish the organization the best of luck,” Stoudemire said in a statement. “Once a Knick always a Knick.”

Last night, for the first time in its history, Denmark’s sole Jewish broadcast station Radio Shalom did not air. Its programming, a mix of Jewish news, culture and music, was shut down by its proprietor on the advice of the country’s security services. “PET says it’s too dangerous,” station head Abraham Kopenhagen told the Danish paper DR Nyheder. “We do not feel that it is too dangerous, but we respect the information we are given.”

The station was offered police protection if it chose to continue broadcasting, but Kopenhagen did not want to work under such conditions. “We must do as instructed, but we will not have police standing outside the door,” he said. “We would rather close down until it is quiet again. I do not know how long that will take.”

Last night, for the first time in its history, Denmark’s sole Jewish broadcast station Radio Shalom did not air. Its programming, a mix of Jewish news, culture and music, was shut down by its proprietor on the advice of the country’s security services. “PET says it’s too dangerous,” station head Abraham Kopenhagen told the Danish paper DR Nyheder. “We do not feel that it is too dangerous, but we respect the information we are given.”

The station was offered police protection if it chose to continue broadcasting, but Kopenhagen did not want to work under such conditions. “We must do as instructed, but we will not have police standing outside the door,” he said. “We would rather close down until it is quiet again. I do not know how long that will take.”

McEnroe opened with a Curb Your Enthusiasm clip and a figure from the oft-cited 2013 Pew study, whose high reported figures of unaffiliated young Jews sparked an alarmist reaction from many quarters of the Jewish communal world. Ingall, Oppenheimer, and the Forward’s Dan Friedman then sounded off on topics like Jewish culture, humor, and identity.

McEnroe opened with a Curb Your Enthusiasm clip and a figure from the oft-cited 2013 Pew study, whose high reported figures of unaffiliated young Jews sparked an alarmist reaction from many quarters of the Jewish communal world. Ingall, Oppenheimer, and the Forward’s Dan Friedman then sounded off on topics like Jewish culture, humor, and identity.

The other day, at a university meeting, I heard a young professor refer scornfully to “the Enlightenment project,” which (she said) proclaimed that the growth of reason was conducive to a fantasy of ultimate perfection, a fantasy that in turn was used to justify colonial conquest.

For some 30 years now, this peculiar phrase has been bouncing around the academy: “the Enlightenment project.” It’s not meant, most of the time, as a compliment. Nor is it the name of Bob Dylan’s next album or Stephin Merritt’s latest band or the island park Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg propose to build (for a projected $140 million and change) over the Hudson River, though it might well serve for any or all.

The other day, at a university meeting, I heard a young professor refer scornfully to “the Enlightenment project,” which (she said) proclaimed that the growth of reason was conducive to a fantasy of ultimate perfection, a fantasy that in turn was used to justify colonial conquest.

For some 30 years now, this peculiar phrase has been bouncing around the academy: “the Enlightenment project.” It’s not meant, most of the time, as a compliment. Nor is it the name of Bob Dylan’s next album or Stephin Merritt’s latest band or the island park Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg propose to build (for a projected $140 million and change) over the Hudson River, though it might well serve for any or all.

How many times did God create human beings? As with many seemingly simple matters, the Torah turns out to be maddeningly ambiguous on this question. In Genesis 5:1-2, we read, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God he made him; male and female he created them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” This description echoes the earlier phrase from Genesis 1:27, which says, “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” But does this describe one act of creation or two? “In his own image” seems to imply one creation, since God surely can’t have two images; but “male and female he created them” suggests that he created each gender separately. And this is not to mention the story of Adam and Eve, which has God creating the first woman from the rib of the first man.

How many times did God create human beings? As with many seemingly simple matters, the Torah turns out to be maddeningly ambiguous on this question. In Genesis 5:1-2, we read, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God he made him; male and female he created them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” This description echoes the earlier phrase from Genesis 1:27, which says, “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” But does this describe one act of creation or two? “In his own image” seems to imply one creation, since God surely can’t have two images; but “male and female he created them” suggests that he created each gender separately. And this is not to mention the story of Adam and Eve, which has God creating the first woman from the rib of the first man.

It’s a little unfair to re-watch a certain kind of drama on television. Unlike comedy—that vital lady whose quips can still floor a crowd—drama too often resembles the aging beauty queen in the corner—weathered, self-important, wearing far too much make-up. Take the 1970s. The armchair bigotry of Archie Bunker; the slaphappy gestures of Suzanne Somers; the sly, anti-’Nam subtext of M*A*S*H. Beyond the zaniness, these shows had something of consequence to say about the decade, a layer of hypocrisy that they were aiming to unspool. Now try sitting through one episode of Hawaii Five-O or Charlie’s Angels.

One genre of drama stands apart in the 1970s: The miniseries, that sprawling, part instructive, part raunchy epic whose premieres became, in the words of one critic, “a national pajama party.” There was Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which first aired in 1977 on ABC, and Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, which came out the following year on NBC. Wondering what effect, if any, these series still had almost 40 years after they first aired, a few months ago I began to watch them both, back to back. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I hadn’t seen either, except for a single episode of Roots—the first one, I think—during English class in my Jerusalem middle school. The reason I remember that, while barely recalling any of the episode’s details, is that, for a while, some kids in my class would go around calling the darker-skinned Sephardim among us “Kunta Kinte” (our teacher, cringingly, seemed to condone this). Like many in my generation, born in the 1980s, I didn’t even know the Holocaust series existed.

It’s a little unfair to re-watch a certain kind of drama on television. Unlike comedy—that vital lady whose quips can still floor a crowd—drama too often resembles the aging beauty queen in the corner—weathered, self-important, wearing far too much make-up. Take the 1970s. The armchair bigotry of Archie Bunker; the slaphappy gestures of Suzanne Somers; the sly, anti-’Nam subtext of M*A*S*H. Beyond the zaniness, these shows had something of consequence to say about the decade, a layer of hypocrisy that they were aiming to unspool. Now try sitting through one episode of Hawaii Five-O or Charlie’s Angels.

One genre of drama stands apart in the 1970s: The miniseries, that sprawling, part instructive, part raunchy epic whose premieres became, in the words of one critic, “a national pajama party.” There was Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which first aired in 1977 on ABC, and Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, which came out the following year on NBC. Wondering what effect, if any, these series still had almost 40 years after they first aired, a few months ago I began to watch them both, back to back. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I hadn’t seen either, except for a single episode of Roots—the first one, I think—during English class in my Jerusalem middle school. The reason I remember that, while barely recalling any of the episode’s details, is that, for a while, some kids in my class would go around calling the darker-skinned Sephardim among us “Kunta Kinte” (our teacher, cringingly, seemed to condone this). Like many in my generation, born in the 1980s, I didn’t even know the Holocaust series existed.

Hours after a gunman opened fire at a Denmark cafe during a discussion about cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, killing one person and wounding three police officers, shots were fired outside a synagogue in downtown Copenhagen, wounding three people. Police haven’t determined whether the attacks were related.

The AP reports that one of the victims was shot in the head, and two other victims, both police officers, were shot in the arms and legs. Police are searching for the perpetrators of both attacks.According to a Chabad rabbi, the city’s Chabad house is under lockdown.

Hours after a gunman opened fire at a Denmark cafe during a discussion about cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, killing one person and wounding three police officers, shots were fired outside a synagogue in downtown Copenhagen, wounding three people. Police haven’t determined whether the attacks were related.

The AP reports that one of the victims was shot in the head, and two other victims, both police officers, were shot in the arms and legs. Police are searching for the perpetrators of both attacks.According to a Chabad rabbi, the city’s Chabad house is under lockdown.

Monday is President’s Day, a day that honors the birthdays of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and and George Washington. Here are some Jewish reads about those and other American presidents, their policies, and, most importantly, their food.

Monday is President’s Day, a day that honors the birthdays of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and and George Washington. Here are some Jewish reads about those and other American presidents, their policies, and, most importantly, their food.

Prominent Washington, D.C. rabbi Barry Freundel’s arrest in August 2014 for voyeurism charges sent shock waves through the Jewish community, particularly among the congregants of Kesher Israel, where he had been the spiritual leader for more than two decades. The disturbing charges against him included installing cameras to spy on women in the synagogue’s adjacent mikvah and showers.

As the investigation continues, the scope of Freundel’s alleged surveillance has been revealed. The AP reports that prosecutors told victims the total number of women filmed using the mikvah was over 150.

Prominent Washington, D.C. rabbi Barry Freundel’s arrest in August 2014 for voyeurism charges sent shock waves through the Jewish community, particularly among the congregants of Kesher Israel, where he had been the spiritual leader for more than two decades. The disturbing charges against him included installing cameras to spy on women in the synagogue’s adjacent mikvah and showers.

As the investigation continues, the scope of Freundel’s alleged surveillance has been revealed. The AP reports that prosecutors told victims the total number of women filmed using the mikvah was over 150.

Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman may be dead, but his decade-long investigation into an alleged government cover-up of the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center appears to be moving forward. Gerardo Pollicita, the prosecutor who took over the case when Nisman was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head the night before he was scheduled to present his findings, has requested that charges be filed against Argentina’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, as well as Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and other government figures for obstructing the investigation. Drafts of arrest warrants for Kirchner and Timerman were found in the garbage at Nisman’s apartment.

Nisman’s investigation concluded that Iran was responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society, known as AMIA, in which 85 people were killed, as well as the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires which killed 29 people and wounded 242. But his findings went further, as Natasha Zaretsky explained: “He argued that President Cristina Kirchner chose to essentially indemnify Iran in the investigation, directing her Minister of Foreign Affairs Héctor Timerman to remove Iran from the AMIA case (and even pursue false local connections)—all to improve trade relations, hoping to exchange Argentine grain for Iranian oil.”

Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman may be dead, but his decade-long investigation into an alleged government cover-up of the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center appears to be moving forward. Gerardo Pollicita, the prosecutor who took over the case when Nisman was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head the night before he was scheduled to present his findings, has requested that charges be filed against Argentina’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, as well as Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and other government figures for obstructing the investigation. Drafts of arrest warrants for Kirchner and Timerman were found in the garbage at Nisman’s apartment.

Nisman’s investigation concluded that Iran was responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society, known as AMIA, in which 85 people were killed, as well as the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires which killed 29 people and wounded 242. But his findings went further, as Natasha Zaretsky explained: “He argued that President Cristina Kirchner chose to essentially indemnify Iran in the investigation, directing her Minister of Foreign Affairs Héctor Timerman to remove Iran from the AMIA case (and even pursue false local connections)—all to improve trade relations, hoping to exchange Argentine grain for Iranian oil.”

Hello young lovers, wherever you are! The most forcibly romantic day of the year is almost upon us, and if you’re currently entangled in the vicious cycle of co-dependency generally termed a “relationship,” you’re probably thinking of ways to celebrate, albeit in a non-cheesy and perhaps even Jewish-y manner (how better to take the St. out of St. Valentine, after all? I mean, it’s not like Hallmark can do it all by themselves, or invented the holiday or anything.) Well, look no further. There are plenty of ways to ensure you and your significant other always remember, in the words of Tevye, who you are and what God expects you to do.

First of all, the most Jewish thing you can do on Valentine’s Day is put it off to the next day. I was watching Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules the other day (a modern masterpiece which deserves a blog post all of its own) and heard Scheana, the waitress notorious for once, in a less affianced incarnation, engaging in sexual congress with Brandi Glanville’s ex-husband Eddie Cibrian, marveling that it was so much cheaper to a have her wedding on a Sunday: “It’s, like, half off.”

Hello young lovers, wherever you are! The most forcibly romantic day of the year is almost upon us, and if you’re currently entangled in the vicious cycle of co-dependency generally termed a “relationship,” you’re probably thinking of ways to celebrate, albeit in a non-cheesy and perhaps even Jewish-y manner (how better to take the St. out of St. Valentine, after all? I mean, it’s not like Hallmark can do it all by themselves, or invented the holiday or anything.) Well, look no further. There are plenty of ways to ensure you and your significant other always remember, in the words of Tevye, who you are and what God expects you to do.

First of all, the most Jewish thing you can do on Valentine’s Day is put it off to the next day. I was watching Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules the other day (a modern masterpiece which deserves a blog post all of its own) and heard Scheana, the waitress notorious for once, in a less affianced incarnation, engaging in sexual congress with Brandi Glanville’s ex-husband Eddie Cibrian, marveling that it was so much cheaper to a have her wedding on a Sunday: “It’s, like, half off.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming Congressional address is not without direct familial precedent. The prime minister’s father also looked to the U.S. Congress in his attempt to mobilize support for Zionism in the 1940s. Benzion Netanyahu, a leading scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, died in Jerusalem in 2012 at age 102. He is known to have had a significant influence on his son’s political thinking and worldview.

Born in Poland in 1910, Benzion Netanyahu was a son of Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a popular Zionist orator. The family made aliyah in 1920, and Hebraicized its name to Netanyahu. In the wake of the Palestinian Arab riots of 1929, Netanyahu was attracted to Revisionist Zionism, the militant wing of the Zionist movement headed by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Netanyahu’s intellectual and literary talents made him a natural to serve as editor of the Revisionist newspaper HaYarden in the 1930s.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming Congressional address is not without direct familial precedent. The prime minister’s father also looked to the U.S. Congress in his attempt to mobilize support for Zionism in the 1940s. Benzion Netanyahu, a leading scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, died in Jerusalem in 2012 at age 102. He is known to have had a significant influence on his son’s political thinking and worldview.

Born in Poland in 1910, Benzion Netanyahu was a son of Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a popular Zionist orator. The family made aliyah in 1920, and Hebraicized its name to Netanyahu. In the wake of the Palestinian Arab riots of 1929, Netanyahu was attracted to Revisionist Zionism, the militant wing of the Zionist movement headed by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Netanyahu’s intellectual and literary talents made him a natural to serve as editor of the Revisionist newspaper HaYarden in the 1930s.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188996/bibi-following-in-his-fathers-footsteps/feed0‘Bubbe, You Were Sleeping at the State of the Union!’http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188997/bubbe-you-were-sleeping-at-the-state-of-the-union
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188997/bubbe-you-were-sleeping-at-the-state-of-the-union#commentsFri, 13 Feb 2015 16:25:10 +0000Stephanie Butnickhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188997

When Supreme Court Justice and general badass Ruth Bader Ginsburg got caught snoozing during President Obama’s State of the Union address in January, the Internet, naturally, loved it. She has a reputation for nodding off during the notoriously long speeches, and her front-row seat makes it easy to get caught on camera.

But Ginsburg says she wasn’t just bored that night—she was a little buzzed. The Blaze reports that the 81-year-old justice told a crowd at Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University that the justices indulged in a bit of wine before the event, and she wasn’t “100 percent sober.”

When Supreme Court Justice and general badass Ruth Bader Ginsburg got caught snoozing during President Obama’s State of the Union address in January, the Internet, naturally, loved it. She has a reputation for nodding off during the notoriously long speeches, and her front-row seat makes it easy to get caught on camera.

But Ginsburg says she wasn’t just bored that night—she was a little buzzed. The Blaze reports that the 81-year-old justice told a crowd at Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University that the justices indulged in a bit of wine before the event, and she wasn’t “100 percent sober.”

Valentine’s Day is upon us, and while it’s no Tu B’Av, it’s enough of a cultural presence that its hard to ignore. Plus, we’ve got enough love-themed stories on Tablet to keep you busy through the weekend, and maybe even until Purim.

Start with the latest episode of Israel Story, which features four not-exactly love stories. There’s a husband and wife in their sixties looking back at their 37 years together, an Israeli and a Palestinian confronting the barriers to love, the twists and turns of an arranged marriage in Tulkarm, and an eavesdropping neighbor following along with the matchmaking quest of the tenant downstairs.

Valentine’s Day is upon us, and while it’s no Tu B’Av, it’s enough of a cultural presence that its hard to ignore. Plus, we’ve got enough love-themed stories on Tablet to keep you busy through the weekend, and maybe even until Purim.

Start with the latest episode of Israel Story, which features four not-exactly love stories. There’s a husband and wife in their sixties looking back at their 37 years together, an Israeli and a Palestinian confronting the barriers to love, the twists and turns of an arranged marriage in Tulkarm, and an eavesdropping neighbor following along with the matchmaking quest of the tenant downstairs.

A note from the author: Yasha Glaz is a Boston-based attorney and clarinet player. I’ve known Yasha for almost 30 years. In common Yasha and I have many vestiges of our Soviet past. Our families emigrated from Moscow around the same time. I first met Yasha in Baltimore, and in the 1990s our paths converged in Boston. We’re good friends and have even shared family vacations. Yasha has previously consented to my writing about his life and adventures, and one of the Yasha Glaz stories lent its title to my collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. This new story deals with a recent family vacation in the Dominican Republic. I’ve personally witnessed some of the events described below, and in telling about them I’ve used just a touch of the storyteller’s license. Please enjoy this Yasha Glaz story and have a great time on your tropical getaways.

A note from the author: Yasha Glaz is a Boston-based attorney and clarinet player. I’ve known Yasha for almost 30 years. In common Yasha and I have many vestiges of our Soviet past. Our families emigrated from Moscow around the same time. I first met Yasha in Baltimore, and in the 1990s our paths converged in Boston. We’re good friends and have even shared family vacations. Yasha has previously consented to my writing about his life and adventures, and one of the Yasha Glaz stories lent its title to my collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. This new story deals with a recent family vacation in the Dominican Republic. I’ve personally witnessed some of the events described below, and in telling about them I’ve used just a touch of the storyteller’s license. Please enjoy this Yasha Glaz story and have a great time on your tropical getaways.

Growing up, my introduction to communicable diseases was mainly limited to what I read in books, like More All-of-a-Kind Family in which an epidemic of “infantile paralysis” left Aunt Lena with a limp. Communicable diseases were in the murky past. I am of the generation who grew up free of the gripping fear that descended on communities during periods of epidemics.

The only personal experience I’d had with serious epidemics was “Joe,” a congregant in the synagogue I used to lead. In 1955, 6-year-old Joe was living in Chicago when the city’s children were getting the first Salk vaccines for polio. Before his side of the city received the vaccine, he got the polio virus. He lost the use of his legs. Thirty years later, Joe fell ill with post-polio syndrome, a condition that affects up to half of those who survive an acute case of polio. He was on a ventilator for the remainder of his life.

Growing up, my introduction to communicable diseases was mainly limited to what I read in books, like More All-of-a-Kind Family in which an epidemic of “infantile paralysis” left Aunt Lena with a limp. Communicable diseases were in the murky past. I am of the generation who grew up free of the gripping fear that descended on communities during periods of epidemics.

The only personal experience I’d had with serious epidemics was “Joe,” a congregant in the synagogue I used to lead. In 1955, 6-year-old Joe was living in Chicago when the city’s children were getting the first Salk vaccines for polio. Before his side of the city received the vaccine, he got the polio virus. He lost the use of his legs. Thirty years later, Joe fell ill with post-polio syndrome, a condition that affects up to half of those who survive an acute case of polio. He was on a ventilator for the remainder of his life.

As Vladmir Putin celebrates yet another diplomatic victory by force, one element of that victory has gone largely unreported in the Western media: the terrorist bombing campaign widely ascribed to clandestine Russian intelligence services that has been carried out weekly across the southern cities such as Kherson, Zaporizhye, Dnipropitrovsk. On Tuesday, on the eve of the Minsk II negotiations, the latest of these attacks targeted the home of the famous Russian-Jewish poet and clinical psychologist Boris Khersonsky in Odessa, where about a dozen similar bombings took place in the last two months. The doors, floors, and windows of Khersonsky’s apartment were blown out, and extensive damage was done to some of the rooms. (Full disclosure: I am a friend of the Khersonsky family.) The same floor of the building also housed a hostel that is currently hosting refugees from Donetsk and Lughansk.

The bomb had been hidden under a pile of garbage bags that lay between the apartment and the hostel. Khersonsky no longer lives at the apartment, but the apartment constituted the poet’s official registered address in city records. His ex-wife Tatiana Khersonska was present at the time of the explosion and has suffered acute hearing loss. The attack took place as Presidents Hollande, Merkel, and Poroshenko arrive in the Bielorussian capital on the eve of the second round of Minsk protocol negotiations that would reward Putin for sponsoring the violence of Russian-backed separatists and for a string of similar attacks.

As Vladmir Putin celebrates yet another diplomatic victory by force, one element of that victory has gone largely unreported in the Western media: the terrorist bombing campaign widely ascribed to clandestine Russian intelligence services that has been carried out weekly across the southern cities such as Kherson, Zaporizhye, Dnipropitrovsk. On Tuesday, on the eve of the Minsk II negotiations, the latest of these attacks targeted the home of the famous Russian-Jewish poet and clinical psychologist Boris Khersonsky in Odessa, where about a dozen similar bombings took place in the last two months. The doors, floors, and windows of Khersonsky’s apartment were blown out, and extensive damage was done to some of the rooms. (Full disclosure: I am a friend of the Khersonsky family.) The same floor of the building also housed a hostel that is currently hosting refugees from Donetsk and Lughansk.

The bomb had been hidden under a pile of garbage bags that lay between the apartment and the hostel. Khersonsky no longer lives at the apartment, but the apartment constituted the poet’s official registered address in city records. His ex-wife Tatiana Khersonska was present at the time of the explosion and has suffered acute hearing loss. The attack took place as Presidents Hollande, Merkel, and Poroshenko arrive in the Bielorussian capital on the eve of the second round of Minsk protocol negotiations that would reward Putin for sponsoring the violence of Russian-backed separatists and for a string of similar attacks.

So, the Jewish parenting site Kveller has made me cry twice in the last two weeks. And this has nothing to do with Mayim Bialik’s perspective on vaccines or baby formula!

Kveller has partnered with the Ruderman Family Foundation, which works for greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the Jewish community. Ruderman is offering financial support and guidance for Kveller’s coverage of disability-related topics for a year. Kveller will be doing two articles a week, one focused on the bar or bat mitzvah experience and one on general topics related to Jews and disability. The collaboration started at the beginning of February, which is not-so-coincidentally Jewish Disabilities Awareness Month.

So, the Jewish parenting site Kveller has made me cry twice in the last two weeks. And this has nothing to do with Mayim Bialik’s perspective on vaccines or baby formula!

Kveller has partnered with the Ruderman Family Foundation, which works for greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the Jewish community. Ruderman is offering financial support and guidance for Kveller’s coverage of disability-related topics for a year. Kveller will be doing two articles a week, one focused on the bar or bat mitzvah experience and one on general topics related to Jews and disability. The collaboration started at the beginning of February, which is not-so-coincidentally Jewish Disabilities Awareness Month.

Andy Cohen is a man who wears many hats: shtick-y late night talk show host who knows how to bring a reluctant guest out her shell with a heavy pour; legendary development executive almost single-handedly responsible for the multi-tentacled grasp the Real Housewives franchise has on our increasingly fragile ecosystem; bon vivant and man about town who seems to know everybody, turn up everywhere, and record it all meticulously and flatteringly on Instagram.

So perhaps it comes as no surprise that on the first page of his newish book (it was published last year in time for the Christmas rush, so forgive me, I’m a little late to the party), The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year, Cohen announces himself as a devoted acolyte of another renowned chronicler of the famous and the freakish, Andy Warhol, and specifically his famous Diaries. Their posthumous publication, in 1989, became for Cohen (then a 21-year-old intern at NBC) a kind of manifesto for living a glamorous, well-connected existence full of fabulous parties and fabulous people.

Andy Cohen is a man who wears many hats: shtick-y late night talk show host who knows how to bring a reluctant guest out her shell with a heavy pour; legendary development executive almost single-handedly responsible for the multi-tentacled grasp the Real Housewives franchise has on our increasingly fragile ecosystem; bon vivant and man about town who seems to know everybody, turn up everywhere, and record it all meticulously and flatteringly on Instagram.

So perhaps it comes as no surprise that on the first page of his newish book (it was published last year in time for the Christmas rush, so forgive me, I’m a little late to the party), The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year, Cohen announces himself as a devoted acolyte of another renowned chronicler of the famous and the freakish, Andy Warhol, and specifically his famous Diaries. Their posthumous publication, in 1989, became for Cohen (then a 21-year-old intern at NBC) a kind of manifesto for living a glamorous, well-connected existence full of fabulous parties and fabulous people.

Racked’s impressive relaunch this week boasted a feature called Fashion Gateway Drugs, in which writer types and fashion folks shared the stories of how they first got hooked on fashion. Iris Apfel, the queen of understated glamour and oversized glasses, credited her mother’s accessory obsession (“I always say she worshipped at the altar of the accessory”). Drew Barrymore remembered seeing movie stars getting dolled up for film roles when she was a kid (“It was like this secret society—they all had eyelash curlers and rollers in their hair and coffee. I felt like I was backstage at a ballet.”). Man Repeller blogger Leandra Medine described a nascent fashion sense developing in spite of the strict uniform her Modern Orthodox Jewish day school required.

Esther Werdiger, Tablet’s art director, contributed a comic about her “complicated” relationship with fashion. In it, she describes growing up feeling both intrigued by the world of fashion and wary of its exclusionary nature. She and all the girls she knew growing up wore long skirts—“Jeans,” she writes in one panel, “honestly felt mythical.” Beyond the directive of modesty, though, she admits didn’t always “have the guts” to wear some of the more creative designs she concocted for herself. It’s a sweet, moving, and completely universal story; you can check it here.

Racked’s impressive relaunch this week boasted a feature called Fashion Gateway Drugs, in which writer types and fashion folks shared the stories of how they first got hooked on fashion. Iris Apfel, the queen of understated glamour and oversized glasses, credited her mother’s accessory obsession (“I always say she worshipped at the altar of the accessory”). Drew Barrymore remembered seeing movie stars getting dolled up for film roles when she was a kid (“It was like this secret society—they all had eyelash curlers and rollers in their hair and coffee. I felt like I was backstage at a ballet.”). Man Repeller blogger Leandra Medine described a nascent fashion sense developing in spite of the strict uniform her Modern Orthodox Jewish day school required.

Esther Werdiger, Tablet’s art director, contributed a comic about her “complicated” relationship with fashion. In it, she describes growing up feeling both intrigued by the world of fashion and wary of its exclusionary nature. She and all the girls she knew growing up wore long skirts—“Jeans,” she writes in one panel, “honestly felt mythical.” Beyond the directive of modesty, though, she admits didn’t always “have the guts” to wear some of the more creative designs she concocted for herself. It’s a sweet, moving, and completely universal story; you can check it here.

The Internet is abuzz with Brian Williams’ disclosure last week of false statements about being on an aircraft that was fired upon in Iraq in 2003. This revelation has brought speculation about the Nightly News host’s time in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, as well as other stories he’s reported. Within a few days of the story breaking, Williams voluntarily stepped down for temporary leave from the anchor desk, saying he’s “presently too much a part of the news due to my actions,” and, by Tuesday, had been suspended from NBC without pay for six months.

Where does that leave us? And what does Judaism say about lying and how to regard the liar?

The Internet is abuzz with Brian Williams’ disclosure last week of false statements about being on an aircraft that was fired upon in Iraq in 2003. This revelation has brought speculation about the Nightly News host’s time in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, as well as other stories he’s reported. Within a few days of the story breaking, Williams voluntarily stepped down for temporary leave from the anchor desk, saying he’s “presently too much a part of the news due to my actions,” and, by Tuesday, had been suspended from NBC without pay for six months.

Where does that leave us? And what does Judaism say about lying and how to regard the liar?

Yesterday, the Student Representative Council and Progressive Youth Alliance at South Africa’s Durban University of Technology called for their school to expel its Jewish students. “As the SRC, we had a meeting and analysed international politics,” SRC secretary Mqondisi Duma told a local paper. “We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.” The demand was immediately rejected by the school’s vice chancellor as “totally unacceptable.”

That anti-Israel students and self-styled progressives would seek to kick Jews out of college in South Africa might seem shocking at first glance. But to anyone who has followed the country’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the push should come as no surprise. In fact, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the illiberal and frequently anti-Semitic actions of the anti-Israel activist community in South Africa.

Yesterday, the Student Representative Council and Progressive Youth Alliance at South Africa’s Durban University of Technology called for their school to expel its Jewish students. “As the SRC, we had a meeting and analysed international politics,” SRC secretary Mqondisi Duma told a local paper. “We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.” The demand was immediately rejected by the school’s vice chancellor as “totally unacceptable.”

That anti-Israel students and self-styled progressives would seek to kick Jews out of college in South Africa might seem shocking at first glance. But to anyone who has followed the country’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the push should come as no surprise. In fact, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the illiberal and frequently anti-Semitic actions of the anti-Israel activist community in South Africa.

Longtime 60 Minutes contributor Bob Simon died Wednesday night in a car crash in New York City. The 73-year-old journalist was riding in a livery cab that hit another vehicle on the West Side Highway and then crashed into the median. Simon was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly after the crash. The cab driver sustained injuries to his arms and legs; the driver of the other vehicle was not injured.

Simon’s long career with CBS began in 1967, and he spent many of those years abroad. He was based in the network’s Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981, and returned to Israel as the network’s chief Middle East correspondent in 1987.

Longtime 60 Minutes contributor Bob Simon died Wednesday night in a car crash in New York City. The 73-year-old journalist was riding in a livery cab that hit another vehicle on the West Side Highway and then crashed into the median. Simon was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly after the crash. The cab driver sustained injuries to his arms and legs; the driver of the other vehicle was not injured.

Simon’s long career with CBS began in 1967, and he spent many of those years abroad. He was based in the network’s Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981, and returned to Israel as the network’s chief Middle East correspondent in 1987.

Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson donated $40 million to Birthright Israel, a hefty addition to the $120 million the Adelson Family Foundation has given the organization in recent years. Adelson and his wife Miriam are some of the most active supporters of the organization (see: the $160 million), which sends Jews between the ages of 18 and 26 on free 10-day trips to Israel.

The gift comes as Adelson, a major Republican donor, is also gearing up for the 2016 presidential elections. He spent $70 million on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, and 2016 is looking like another expensive year for the Las Vegas Sands Corp. chairman and CEO. He’s already met with several potential Republican candidates, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the wide field of early contenders means a tough primary season before a party nominee is named. Adelson will likely decide soon who he’ll throw his weight—and his money—behind.

Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson donated $40 million to Birthright Israel, a hefty addition to the $120 million the Adelson Family Foundation has given the organization in recent years. Adelson and his wife Miriam are some of the most active supporters of the organization (see: the $160 million), which sends Jews between the ages of 18 and 26 on free 10-day trips to Israel.

The gift comes as Adelson, a major Republican donor, is also gearing up for the 2016 presidential elections. He spent $70 million on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, and 2016 is looking like another expensive year for the Las Vegas Sands Corp. chairman and CEO. He’s already met with several potential Republican candidates, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the wide field of early contenders means a tough primary season before a party nominee is named. Adelson will likely decide soon who he’ll throw his weight—and his money—behind.

What is the right way to talk about terrorism in a politicized atmosphere? The United Nations staged a “high-level” panel discussion the other day on this topic, under the sponsorship of the Swedish and Indonesian missions. And the right way proved to be elusive, which may suggest the depth of our problem. The U.N. filmed the conversation and has put it online under the title, “Staying Together—Dialogue in the Face of Violent Extremism.” You might want to have a look. Some sharply phrased exchanges took place. I was one of the panelists, and certain of those phrases were launched from my own microphone, and, then again, other phrases were launched in my direction by the newly appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, H.R.H. Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, and by other people on the panel and by diplomats in the hall. A number of differences did get aired—though I have to warn you that, if you call up the video in search of those differences, the video’s unfortunate habit of freezing from time to time may try your patience.

But never mind the video. The moderator was a TV journalist for Al Jazeera named Ghida Fakhry Khane, who reminded everyone in her introductory comments of the shocking events in Paris just recently. She invited remarks from the Permanent Representative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, from the Director-General of UNESCO, from the High Commissioner and a number of other distinguished worthies from Sweden and Indonesia. And, when at last she turned to me, I vented my frustration at what has become by now an old and characteristic and infuriating habit of our era, which, in regard to naming the source of terror, adds up to self-censorship. At the high-level panel, every last person was a declared enemy of “violent extremism.” And yet, nobody wanted to mention that, in Paris just now, the violent extremism in question turned out to be Islamist extremism. Therefore I introduced the word Islamism into the conversation.

What is the right way to talk about terrorism in a politicized atmosphere? The United Nations staged a “high-level” panel discussion the other day on this topic, under the sponsorship of the Swedish and Indonesian missions. And the right way proved to be elusive, which may suggest the depth of our problem. The U.N. filmed the conversation and has put it online under the title, “Staying Together—Dialogue in the Face of Violent Extremism.” You might want to have a look. Some sharply phrased exchanges took place. I was one of the panelists, and certain of those phrases were launched from my own microphone, and, then again, other phrases were launched in my direction by the newly appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, H.R.H. Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, and by other people on the panel and by diplomats in the hall. A number of differences did get aired—though I have to warn you that, if you call up the video in search of those differences, the video’s unfortunate habit of freezing from time to time may try your patience.

But never mind the video. The moderator was a TV journalist for Al Jazeera named Ghida Fakhry Khane, who reminded everyone in her introductory comments of the shocking events in Paris just recently. She invited remarks from the Permanent Representative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, from the Director-General of UNESCO, from the High Commissioner and a number of other distinguished worthies from Sweden and Indonesia. And, when at last she turned to me, I vented my frustration at what has become by now an old and characteristic and infuriating habit of our era, which, in regard to naming the source of terror, adds up to self-censorship. At the high-level panel, every last person was a declared enemy of “violent extremism.” And yet, nobody wanted to mention that, in Paris just now, the violent extremism in question turned out to be Islamist extremism. Therefore I introduced the word Islamism into the conversation.

Last week, I had some unkind words for the New York Times, whose account of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress had to be amended to reflect the fact that Bibi accepted the invitation after the White House was informed, not before. No sooner had the piece run than friends, colleagues, and assorted observers began to frantically assail me with the idea that while the Times had issued a correction, the question of whether Bibi accepted the invitation before or after wasn’t important after all. The real issue, they scolded me, in increasingly exasperated and acrimonious language, was and remains Bibi’s flauting of the established rules of respectful behavior.

In the Calvin and Hobbes comics, Calvin enjoyed playing a very special game called Calvinball, in which he made up the rules as he went along to make sure he was always winning. Reading the continuous coverage of Bibi’s visit in the last few days makes you feel that the White House and its supporters are now playing their own version of Calvinball; let’s call it “protocol,” which is the official-sounding scare-word they use to imply that Bibi’s behavior was thoroughly out-of-bounds.

Last week, I had some unkind words for the New York Times, whose account of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress had to be amended to reflect the fact that Bibi accepted the invitation after the White House was informed, not before. No sooner had the piece run than friends, colleagues, and assorted observers began to frantically assail me with the idea that while the Times had issued a correction, the question of whether Bibi accepted the invitation before or after wasn’t important after all. The real issue, they scolded me, in increasingly exasperated and acrimonious language, was and remains Bibi’s flauting of the established rules of respectful behavior.

In the Calvin and Hobbes comics, Calvin enjoyed playing a very special game called Calvinball, in which he made up the rules as he went along to make sure he was always winning. Reading the continuous coverage of Bibi’s visit in the last few days makes you feel that the White House and its supporters are now playing their own version of Calvinball; let’s call it “protocol,” which is the official-sounding scare-word they use to imply that Bibi’s behavior was thoroughly out-of-bounds.

Earlier this month, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, had to walk back some comments she’d made, in which she’d called intermarriage a “problem” and fretted about how young Jews weren’t connected to Jewish traditions and institutions. While she ultimately clarified that she wasn’t against intermarriage per se, the ensuing media response among both Jewish and mainstream outlets was predictably rapid and unforgiving.

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon—a holiday devoted to affirming the promise that a loving connection between two individuals can hold—we would like to offer a perspective on the season based on a unique research project we’ve been overseeing since early in our own relationship.

Earlier this month, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, had to walk back some comments she’d made, in which she’d called intermarriage a “problem” and fretted about how young Jews weren’t connected to Jewish traditions and institutions. While she ultimately clarified that she wasn’t against intermarriage per se, the ensuing media response among both Jewish and mainstream outlets was predictably rapid and unforgiving.

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon—a holiday devoted to affirming the promise that a loving connection between two individuals can hold—we would like to offer a perspective on the season based on a unique research project we’ve been overseeing since early in our own relationship.

Moishe Cohen, the man we have to thank for Economy Candy, the sugar haven on New York City’s Lower East Side, died last week at 97. Cohen opened the Rivington Street shop in 1937, when he was 19, and the store quickly made a name for itself with its cheap candy, enormous selection, and haimish atmosphere. That reputation has lasted, and Economy Candy is a regular stop for tourists and New Yorkers alike, who are all won over by the place’s old-school charm.

The store, which is now run by Moishe’s grandson, Mitchell Cohen, announced the death on its Facebook page: “It is with great sadness and fond memories that we share with the Economy Candy family that we lost Morris ‘Moishe’ Cohen, the Original Candy Man at the age of 97.” The comments below the post, many of which were written by former Economy Candy employees, are a moving testament to Moishe’s character. “The man was my boss and also like a father to us,” one comment said. “Thanks for taking care of me and making me the man I’ve became,” said another. Two employees from the 1970s fondly remembered getting to drive Cohen’s Lincoln continental for pickups and deliveries.

Moishe Cohen, the man we have to thank for Economy Candy, the sugar haven on New York City’s Lower East Side, died last week at 97. Cohen opened the Rivington Street shop in 1937, when he was 19, and the store quickly made a name for itself with its cheap candy, enormous selection, and haimish atmosphere. That reputation has lasted, and Economy Candy is a regular stop for tourists and New Yorkers alike, who are all won over by the place’s old-school charm.

The store, which is now run by Moishe’s grandson, Mitchell Cohen, announced the death on its Facebook page: “It is with great sadness and fond memories that we share with the Economy Candy family that we lost Morris ‘Moishe’ Cohen, the Original Candy Man at the age of 97.” The comments below the post, many of which were written by former Economy Candy employees, are a moving testament to Moishe’s character. “The man was my boss and also like a father to us,” one comment said. “Thanks for taking care of me and making me the man I’ve became,” said another. Two employees from the 1970s fondly remembered getting to drive Cohen’s Lincoln continental for pickups and deliveries.

Ever since Alberto Nisman, the Argentinian prosecutor investigating the deadly 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, was found dead in his apartment Jan. 18 from a bullet in his head—the day before he was scheduled to testify against Argentina’s president and foreign minister, implicating them in an alleged cover-up of Iran’s involvement in the attack—the story has only gotten more mysterious and troubling.

Nisman’s death, first characterized by the government as a suicide, was soon cryptically described as the work of an anti-government agents. (Others have speculated whether Iran could be behind the murder). Weeks later a Jewish journalist reporting on the Nisman death fled to Israel, citing escalating threats he attributed to the government. Soon after that, investigators found arrest warrants for Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, dated June 2014, in the garbage at Nisman’s home.

Ever since Alberto Nisman, the Argentinian prosecutor investigating the deadly 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, was found dead in his apartment Jan. 18 from a bullet in his head—the day before he was scheduled to testify against Argentina’s president and foreign minister, implicating them in an alleged cover-up of Iran’s involvement in the attack—the story has only gotten more mysterious and troubling.

Nisman’s death, first characterized by the government as a suicide, was soon cryptically described as the work of an anti-government agents. (Others have speculated whether Iran could be behind the murder). Weeks later a Jewish journalist reporting on the Nisman death fled to Israel, citing escalating threats he attributed to the government. Soon after that, investigators found arrest warrants for Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, dated June 2014, in the garbage at Nisman’s home.

A Chapel Hill, N.C. man was arrested Wednesday for the shooting deaths of three Muslim students in their apartment in the same complex as his. The three victims were newlyweds Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and Abu-Salha’s sister, 19-year-old Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. Barakat was a graduate dental student at U.N.C., and the younger Abu-Salha sister was an undergraduate at nearby N.C. State. The elder Abu-Salha planned on enrolling at U.N.C. in the fall.

Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, was arrested after turning himself in to police. He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and is being held without bail. Police have said their initial investigation suggested the murders had to do with an ongoing conflict over a parking space, but that they weren’t ruling out the possibility of a hate crime.

A Chapel Hill, N.C. man was arrested Wednesday for the shooting deaths of three Muslim students in their apartment in the same complex as his. The three victims were newlyweds Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and Abu-Salha’s sister, 19-year-old Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. Barakat was a graduate dental student at U.N.C., and the younger Abu-Salha sister was an undergraduate at nearby N.C. State. The elder Abu-Salha planned on enrolling at U.N.C. in the fall.

Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, was arrested after turning himself in to police. He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and is being held without bail. Police have said their initial investigation suggested the murders had to do with an ongoing conflict over a parking space, but that they weren’t ruling out the possibility of a hate crime.

Last night on The Daily Show With John Stewart, after an interminable interview with David Axelrod, Stewart made a surprising announcement to the audience: he would be leaving the show later this year after 17 years of hosting. “I don’t have any specific plans,” Stewart said. “Got a lot of ideas. I got a lot of things in my head. I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people.”

“I’m not going anywhere tomorrow,” he continued. “But this show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host, and neither do you.”

Last night on The Daily Show With John Stewart, after an interminable interview with David Axelrod, Stewart made a surprising announcement to the audience: he would be leaving the show later this year after 17 years of hosting. “I don’t have any specific plans,” Stewart said. “Got a lot of ideas. I got a lot of things in my head. I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people.”

“I’m not going anywhere tomorrow,” he continued. “But this show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host, and neither do you.”

Los Angeles Jewish Home, the retirement facility behind viral gems like this Yiddish lesson, released their newest video just in time for Valentine’s Day. In this one, a guy named Jonathan stops by to get some advice about his love life. He and the residents discuss everything from flirting to JSwipe to sex on the first date, and then he gets his cheeks pinched.

Los Angeles Jewish Home, the retirement facility behind viral gems like this Yiddish lesson, released their newest video just in time for Valentine’s Day. In this one, a guy named Jonathan stops by to get some advice about his love life. He and the residents discuss everything from flirting to JSwipe to sex on the first date, and then he gets his cheeks pinched.

Israeli novelist Gail Hareven has written 11 books, one of which received Israel’s highest literary honor, the Sapir Prize. Yet like most Israeli writers, even the most popular, she remains little known in the United States: Lies, First Person, her newly translated novel, is only the second of her books to appear in English, after The Confessions of Noa Weber, which appeared here in 2009. Both books are tales of obsession; but while Confessions deals with a romantic and sexual fixation, Lies broadens into something stranger and more resonant. For the things that obsess Elinor Brandeis, the narrator, are at once utterly personal and deeply rooted in Jewish history and identity: the nature of trauma, the memory of injustice, and the desperate need to find a sense of safety in a dangerous world.

As the book opens, Elinor seems to enjoy a serene middle-class existence, which she herself describes as a Garden of Eden. A middle-aged mother of two grown sons, she is relaxing on Shabbat afternoon with her beloved husband Oded, in the garden of their Jerusalem home, smoking a joint and drinking wine. “The golden Sabbath time stretches out around us without a point of reference—perhaps it’s morning now, perhaps it’s twilight—people whose lives are as good as ours don’t need points of reference,” she boasts ironically.

Israeli novelist Gail Hareven has written 11 books, one of which received Israel’s highest literary honor, the Sapir Prize. Yet like most Israeli writers, even the most popular, she remains little known in the United States: Lies, First Person, her newly translated novel, is only the second of her books to appear in English, after The Confessions of Noa Weber, which appeared here in 2009. Both books are tales of obsession; but while Confessions deals with a romantic and sexual fixation, Lies broadens into something stranger and more resonant. For the things that obsess Elinor Brandeis, the narrator, are at once utterly personal and deeply rooted in Jewish history and identity: the nature of trauma, the memory of injustice, and the desperate need to find a sense of safety in a dangerous world.

As the book opens, Elinor seems to enjoy a serene middle-class existence, which she herself describes as a Garden of Eden. A middle-aged mother of two grown sons, she is relaxing on Shabbat afternoon with her beloved husband Oded, in the garden of their Jerusalem home, smoking a joint and drinking wine. “The golden Sabbath time stretches out around us without a point of reference—perhaps it’s morning now, perhaps it’s twilight—people whose lives are as good as ours don’t need points of reference,” she boasts ironically.

Paul Berman’s recent essay in Tablet magazine “Why Is the Islamist Death Cult So Appealing?” is a wonderful piece on the history of Islamist ideas, but Berman does not really answer the question that he poses in his first line: “Why do people who are not clinically crazy throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide?” Berman’s conclusion is that “apocalyptic dreams, the cult of hatred and murder and yearning for death” born of unhappiness is what motivates Islamist terrorists, and further that “eschatological rebellion against everyday morality satisfies them.” But is that why they do it? Is that what motivates men in hoods to publicly decapitate an individual with a knife, or pose smiling with the severed head of a woman, or put bullets into the heads of hundreds of captives and toss them into the river, or most recently throw a prisoner into a cage and light him on fire? Berman addresses the ideological part of the problem, but buried deeper is the psychological pull of sadomasochism—the thrill of violence, power, and control that comes from inflicting pain on others. This is the unspoken driver of the appeal of the Islamic State and similar groups.

Although we cannot know what goes on inside anyone’s head, the tools of psychoanalysis offer some tantalizing, and I believe promising, angles of interpretation. To be fair, military strategists, national security specialists, criminal-justice professionals and journalists are not trained to observe these men as if they were patients. They may have read the works of Islamists like Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al Banna, but they lack the diagnostic skills needed to access the deeper unconscious levels of psychology that are necessary for understanding the attraction of sadomasochism.

Paul Berman’s recent essay in Tablet magazine “Why Is the Islamist Death Cult So Appealing?” is a wonderful piece on the history of Islamist ideas, but Berman does not really answer the question that he poses in his first line: “Why do people who are not clinically crazy throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide?” Berman’s conclusion is that “apocalyptic dreams, the cult of hatred and murder and yearning for death” born of unhappiness is what motivates Islamist terrorists, and further that “eschatological rebellion against everyday morality satisfies them.” But is that why they do it? Is that what motivates men in hoods to publicly decapitate an individual with a knife, or pose smiling with the severed head of a woman, or put bullets into the heads of hundreds of captives and toss them into the river, or most recently throw a prisoner into a cage and light him on fire? Berman addresses the ideological part of the problem, but buried deeper is the psychological pull of sadomasochism—the thrill of violence, power, and control that comes from inflicting pain on others. This is the unspoken driver of the appeal of the Islamic State and similar groups.

Although we cannot know what goes on inside anyone’s head, the tools of psychoanalysis offer some tantalizing, and I believe promising, angles of interpretation. To be fair, military strategists, national security specialists, criminal-justice professionals and journalists are not trained to observe these men as if they were patients. They may have read the works of Islamists like Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al Banna, but they lack the diagnostic skills needed to access the deeper unconscious levels of psychology that are necessary for understanding the attraction of sadomasochism.

In the wake of the shooting at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris that left four Jews dead, French President Hollande immediately condemned the massacre as an “appalling anti-Semitic act.” These words were echoed last month by President Obama, who said that “Anti-Semitic attacks like the recent terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris pose a threat that extends beyond the Jewish community.” Obama’s ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power likewise emphasized that “all four [victims] were casualties of violent anti-Semitism–targets because they were Jews.” After all, the murderer himself, when asked by reporters over the phone if he was targeting the store for a reason, said “Yes, I am: Jews.”

And yet, in an interview with Vox published this week, Obama seemed to say something very different. “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” he told interviewer Matt Yglesias. To many readers, this implied that the massacre was not a specifically anti-Jewish act, and reporters quickly raised the issue at today’s press briefings.

In the wake of the shooting at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris that left four Jews dead, French President Hollande immediately condemned the massacre as an “appalling anti-Semitic act.” These words were echoed last month by President Obama, who said that “Anti-Semitic attacks like the recent terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris pose a threat that extends beyond the Jewish community.” Obama’s ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power likewise emphasized that “all four [victims] were casualties of violent anti-Semitism–targets because they were Jews.” After all, the murderer himself, when asked by reporters over the phone if he was targeting the store for a reason, said “Yes, I am: Jews.”

And yet, in an interview with Vox published this week, Obama seemed to say something very different. “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” he told interviewer Matt Yglesias. To many readers, this implied that the massacre was not a specifically anti-Jewish act, and reporters quickly raised the issue at today’s press briefings.

Ed Sabol, founder of NFL Films and the man responsible for how we view—quite literally—the sport of football today, died Monday at the age of 98. The filmmaker, who is also credited as the inventor of the sports blooper reel, revolutionized the genre of sports photography and videography with his innovative and creative approach to filming.

“Ed Sabol played a significant role in making professional football America’s No. 1 spectator sport, in part by borrowing from Hollywood,” Sabol’s New York Timesobit explains. “He deployed multiple cameras, zoomed in for raw close-up shots — of a linebacker’s bloody knuckles, for example — employed unexpected angles, added slow motion for dramatic effect, and put microphones on players, coaches and officials, capturing exhortations and the thuds and grunts of a violent game.”

Ed Sabol, founder of NFL Films and the man responsible for how we view—quite literally—the sport of football today, died Monday at the age of 98. The filmmaker, who is also credited as the inventor of the sports blooper reel, revolutionized the genre of sports photography and videography with his innovative and creative approach to filming.

“Ed Sabol played a significant role in making professional football America’s No. 1 spectator sport, in part by borrowing from Hollywood,” Sabol’s New York Timesobit explains. “He deployed multiple cameras, zoomed in for raw close-up shots — of a linebacker’s bloody knuckles, for example — employed unexpected angles, added slow motion for dramatic effect, and put microphones on players, coaches and officials, capturing exhortations and the thuds and grunts of a violent game.”

Gary Shteyngart is headed for the small screen, and Ben Stiller is leading the charge. Stiller is producing a television adaptation of Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Super Sad True Love Story is set a near-future dystopia of materialism and political repression, but the focus is on a Russian-born Jewish man and his infatuation with a Korean-American young woman. The book is Shteyngart’s most recent novel—he’s since published Little Failure, a memoir (also about a Russian-born Jewish man who eventually falls in love with a Korean-American woman).

Gary Shteyngart is headed for the small screen, and Ben Stiller is leading the charge. Stiller is producing a television adaptation of Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Super Sad True Love Story is set a near-future dystopia of materialism and political repression, but the focus is on a Russian-born Jewish man and his infatuation with a Korean-American young woman. The book is Shteyngart’s most recent novel—he’s since published Little Failure, a memoir (also about a Russian-born Jewish man who eventually falls in love with a Korean-American woman).

“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.’” So wrote Colson Whitehead after the September 11 attacks, and its truth endures. The sentiment it embodies is something of a foundational credo for the Brooklyn-centric website Brownstoner, which regularly features a “Building of the Day,” delving into the particulars of a building’s past and making history buffs, architecture fans, neighborhood zealots, and anyone interested in the evolution of cities swoon or weep, depending on your point of view.

Today’s feature examines 1147 Eastern Parkway, down a stretch from Chabad World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, a section of Brooklyn now home to a large Hasidic population. When the home was built in the 1920s, though, the neighborhood’s Jews were immigrants from Eastern European who “were joining the wealthy German Jewish families already there,” writes Montrose Morris in the post. “A look at the state census of 1925 on Eastern Parkway near this house shows that almost all of the people living on the Parkway within a two block radius from this address were Jewish, with Yiddish as a first language, many born in Russia or Poland, or the first generation of American-born, with parents born in Russia or Poland.”

“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.’” So wrote Colson Whitehead after the September 11 attacks, and its truth endures. The sentiment it embodies is something of a foundational credo for the Brooklyn-centric website Brownstoner, which regularly features a “Building of the Day,” delving into the particulars of a building’s past and making history buffs, architecture fans, neighborhood zealots, and anyone interested in the evolution of cities swoon or weep, depending on your point of view.

Today’s feature examines 1147 Eastern Parkway, down a stretch from Chabad World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, a section of Brooklyn now home to a large Hasidic population. When the home was built in the 1920s, though, the neighborhood’s Jews were immigrants from Eastern European who “were joining the wealthy German Jewish families already there,” writes Montrose Morris in the post. “A look at the state census of 1925 on Eastern Parkway near this house shows that almost all of the people living on the Parkway within a two block radius from this address were Jewish, with Yiddish as a first language, many born in Russia or Poland, or the first generation of American-born, with parents born in Russia or Poland.”

Urban Outfitters, that bastion of pre-teen fashion angst and Coachella-ready crop tops, has come under fire for hawking a dorm room-ready tapestry that looks a whole lot like a concentration camp uniform. It even has a pink triangle on it, the Nazi designation assigned to gay men and affixed to their concentration camp uniforms.

Have we learned nothing from the Zara striped kids’ pajama shirt with yellow star debacle of 2014?

Urban Outfitters, that bastion of pre-teen fashion angst and Coachella-ready crop tops, has come under fire for hawking a dorm room-ready tapestry that looks a whole lot like a concentration camp uniform. It even has a pink triangle on it, the Nazi designation assigned to gay men and affixed to their concentration camp uniforms.

Have we learned nothing from the Zara striped kids’ pajama shirt with yellow star debacle of 2014?

Elisa Albert’s new novel After Birth gave my highlighter pen a workout. It’s the story of Ari—Brooklyn escapee to upstate New York, all-but-dissertation grad student in women’s studies, wife to a 15-years-older professor named Paul, mother to a baby named Walker, possessor of a rip-roaring case of postpartum (and likely pre-partum) depression—and the witty lines and amusingly nasty quips come fast and furious. Albert is seriously funny. (Also seriously foul-mouthed. Readers with delicate sensibilities should go read a soothing story about Muslim extremists or rising Italian anti-Semitism.)

Elisa Albert’s new novel After Birth gave my highlighter pen a workout. It’s the story of Ari—Brooklyn escapee to upstate New York, all-but-dissertation grad student in women’s studies, wife to a 15-years-older professor named Paul, mother to a baby named Walker, possessor of a rip-roaring case of postpartum (and likely pre-partum) depression—and the witty lines and amusingly nasty quips come fast and furious. Albert is seriously funny. (Also seriously foul-mouthed. Readers with delicate sensibilities should go read a soothing story about Muslim extremists or rising Italian anti-Semitism.)

In most Jewish weddings today, the ketubah or wedding contract is treated as a piece of artwork to display rather than a legal document to live by. In fact, I’d guess that most Jewish couples who sign a ketubah under their rabbi’s supervision don’t have any idea what the Hebrew text actually says—it’s simply part of the tradition. But under Talmudic law, the ketubah is not just a flourish; it is just what its name implies, a “written” contract that lays out the precise monetary and practical obligations that the bride and groom incur by getting married. Those obligations are the subject matter of Tractate Ketubot, which Daf Yomi readers began this week.

In most Jewish weddings today, the ketubah or wedding contract is treated as a piece of artwork to display rather than a legal document to live by. In fact, I’d guess that most Jewish couples who sign a ketubah under their rabbi’s supervision don’t have any idea what the Hebrew text actually says—it’s simply part of the tradition. But under Talmudic law, the ketubah is not just a flourish; it is just what its name implies, a “written” contract that lays out the precise monetary and practical obligations that the bride and groom incur by getting married. Those obligations are the subject matter of Tractate Ketubot, which Daf Yomi readers began this week.

The jingle is decidedly cute and catchy, both annoying and familiar. You know the tune: one-eight seven seven kars 4 kids. Don Imus was caught ranting about it in 2010 as it played during a commercial break on his radio show. Radio duo Opie and Anthony echoed the sentiment, saying that “the commercial goes right into your very soul.” The opening segment to a December 2014 Saturday Night Livesegment parodying the United States Military torture report joked the earworm was created by the same psychologists who developed the torture techniques and wondered whether the charity helps the kids or the cars.

The jingle belongs to a national charitable organization that has a presence in every state, as well as countless billboards, Internet advertisements, and a recently released television commercial (click if you dare) that puts adorable faces to the sweet voices behind the ditty: four goofy-looking kids clad in ’80s-band style clothes, lip-syncing and rocking out on signature-pink guitars.

The jingle is decidedly cute and catchy, both annoying and familiar. You know the tune: one-eight seven seven kars 4 kids. Don Imus was caught ranting about it in 2010 as it played during a commercial break on his radio show. Radio duo Opie and Anthony echoed the sentiment, saying that “the commercial goes right into your very soul.” The opening segment to a December 2014 Saturday Night Livesegment parodying the United States Military torture report joked the earworm was created by the same psychologists who developed the torture techniques and wondered whether the charity helps the kids or the cars.

The jingle belongs to a national charitable organization that has a presence in every state, as well as countless billboards, Internet advertisements, and a recently released television commercial (click if you dare) that puts adorable faces to the sweet voices behind the ditty: four goofy-looking kids clad in ’80s-band style clothes, lip-syncing and rocking out on signature-pink guitars.

The controversy surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled speech to Congress, two weeks before Israel’s March 17 Knesset elections , has everyone from U.S. politicians to Israeli politicians, American Jewish leaders, and even The Daily Show’sJon Stewart riled up. Netanyahu’s invitation from Republican House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the threat it poses to the global community has reportedly angered the White House, who called the move “a breach of protocol.” President Obama has said he won’t be meeting with Netanyahu during the March 3 visit.

Despite a Reuters report Monday saying Netanyahu considered canceling his speech or amending its format to calm tensions, the Prime Minister’s office said there are no changes and that Netanyahu is still planning to speak.

The controversy surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled speech to Congress, two weeks before Israel’s March 17 Knesset elections , has everyone from U.S. politicians to Israeli politicians, American Jewish leaders, and even The Daily Show’sJon Stewart riled up. Netanyahu’s invitation from Republican House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the threat it poses to the global community has reportedly angered the White House, who called the move “a breach of protocol.” President Obama has said he won’t be meeting with Netanyahu during the March 3 visit.

Despite a Reuters report Monday saying Netanyahu considered canceling his speech or amending its format to calm tensions, the Prime Minister’s office said there are no changes and that Netanyahu is still planning to speak.

Broadway producer Jordan Roth announced last week that Falsettos will return to Broadway in the spring of 2016. James Lapine, the musical’s book writer, will direct.

Lapine and William Finn’s musical tells the story of Marvin, a gay Jewish man who has to deal with everything from his boyfriend, to his incipient ex-wife, to his son’s bar mitzvah. The show originally played in a series of one-acts off-Broadway before making its debut on the Great White Way in 1992. That production garnered two Tony Awards, plus a nomination for Best Musical.

Broadway producer Jordan Roth announced last week that Falsettos will return to Broadway in the spring of 2016. James Lapine, the musical’s book writer, will direct.

Lapine and William Finn’s musical tells the story of Marvin, a gay Jewish man who has to deal with everything from his boyfriend, to his incipient ex-wife, to his son’s bar mitzvah. The show originally played in a series of one-acts off-Broadway before making its debut on the Great White Way in 1992. That production garnered two Tony Awards, plus a nomination for Best Musical.

Some of you may have already noticed a change to Tablet. Starting today, we are asking readers to pay to comment on our stories. All of the articles remain entirely free to read. The only thing that requires a donation to access is the talk-back section. The rates are small:

Some of you may have already noticed a change to Tablet. Starting today, we are asking readers to pay to comment on our stories. All of the articles remain entirely free to read. The only thing that requires a donation to access is the talk-back section. The rates are small:

James Foley and Steven Sotloff, two American journalists murdered by ISIS in 2014, were awarded the Daniel Pearl Award by the Anti-Defamation League on Friday. The award is named in honor of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.

Diane Foley, the mother of James Foley, and Shirley and Arthur Sotloff, the parents of Steven Sotloff, accepted the awards on behalf of their sons. Sotloff, who held dual American-Israeli citizenship, was kidnapped in Syria while freelancing for Time magazine and other publications. He was raised in Miami’s Jewish community and later went to college in Israel.

James Foley and Steven Sotloff, two American journalists murdered by ISIS in 2014, were awarded the Daniel Pearl Award by the Anti-Defamation League on Friday. The award is named in honor of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.

Diane Foley, the mother of James Foley, and Shirley and Arthur Sotloff, the parents of Steven Sotloff, accepted the awards on behalf of their sons. Sotloff, who held dual American-Israeli citizenship, was kidnapped in Syria while freelancing for Time magazine and other publications. He was raised in Miami’s Jewish community and later went to college in Israel.

My father has been having trouble breathing in the last few years. “I feel OK,” he told me a few weeks ago, “but it’s hard for me to move a step or two without losing my breath.”

Dad has a full life, teaching and writing and entertaining—he even just took up the piano, in his eighties. But he knows that for many people there comes a time when systems fail, when medical technology breaks down in the face of the demands of death and decay, and the priests and priestesses of modern medicine offer no hope and no salve. “The doctors are doing their best,” he assured me, but I wondered if this faint praise was a prelude to admitting defeat.

My father has been having trouble breathing in the last few years. “I feel OK,” he told me a few weeks ago, “but it’s hard for me to move a step or two without losing my breath.”

Dad has a full life, teaching and writing and entertaining—he even just took up the piano, in his eighties. But he knows that for many people there comes a time when systems fail, when medical technology breaks down in the face of the demands of death and decay, and the priests and priestesses of modern medicine offer no hope and no salve. “The doctors are doing their best,” he assured me, but I wondered if this faint praise was a prelude to admitting defeat.

Last September, at the Sa Khan Thar hotel and restaurant in Maymyo, an old Burmese hill station on the road to Mandalay, I met local historian U Chit Swe. He is the establishment’s proprietor and headwaiter, so he first took my lunch order, then sat down to try to remember events from his 82 years.

“I knew three or four Jewish families living in Maymyo,” he said in halting English. He then went to the corner of the room, rummaged in a stack of books and papers, and returned with a colonial map of the town and a document with the names and addresses of 158 historic villas, most of them still standing. On a display table nearby stood several of his books in Burmese about Maymyo (pronounced May-miyo, the town was officially renamed Pyin Oo Lwin several years ago—just as Burma became Myanmar and Rangoon Yangon). He said he had also published three biographies about Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s most recognizable opposition figure.

Last September, at the Sa Khan Thar hotel and restaurant in Maymyo, an old Burmese hill station on the road to Mandalay, I met local historian U Chit Swe. He is the establishment’s proprietor and headwaiter, so he first took my lunch order, then sat down to try to remember events from his 82 years.

“I knew three or four Jewish families living in Maymyo,” he said in halting English. He then went to the corner of the room, rummaged in a stack of books and papers, and returned with a colonial map of the town and a document with the names and addresses of 158 historic villas, most of them still standing. On a display table nearby stood several of his books in Burmese about Maymyo (pronounced May-miyo, the town was officially renamed Pyin Oo Lwin several years ago—just as Burma became Myanmar and Rangoon Yangon). He said he had also published three biographies about Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s most recognizable opposition figure.

Michael Chabon’s beguilingly eccentric Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in the Alaskan panhandle, as imaginatively depicted in his 2007 bookThe Yiddish Policeman’s Union, would likely have delighted Sir Martin Gilbert. It was exactly the kind of unexamined setting that his mind often opted to give voice to. With his death this week at age 78, the world indeed lost one of its finest chroniclers; a master weaver of cogent narratives composed of numerous small lives and esoterica enveloping larger-than-life figures and epochs. With a bibliography that features more than 90 books, even a cursory glance at his titles fatigues and impresses.

As prodigious as his output as a scholar was, it was his generosity with people that I will remember most. Sir Martin was my friend. He had many to be sure, dignitaries and gardeners alike, but when he addressed you, his attention was yours.

Michael Chabon’s beguilingly eccentric Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in the Alaskan panhandle, as imaginatively depicted in his 2007 bookThe Yiddish Policeman’s Union, would likely have delighted Sir Martin Gilbert. It was exactly the kind of unexamined setting that his mind often opted to give voice to. With his death this week at age 78, the world indeed lost one of its finest chroniclers; a master weaver of cogent narratives composed of numerous small lives and esoterica enveloping larger-than-life figures and epochs. With a bibliography that features more than 90 books, even a cursory glance at his titles fatigues and impresses.

As prodigious as his output as a scholar was, it was his generosity with people that I will remember most. Sir Martin was my friend. He had many to be sure, dignitaries and gardeners alike, but when he addressed you, his attention was yours.

If you grew up Jewish in suburban Detroit, you know what Joe Cornell is. Every fall, hundreds of sixth graders embark on the entertainment center’s 12 week dance class to get them ready for a full season of bar and bat mitzvahs. Zak Rosen has been following the progress of two Joe Cornell students, as they make their way through the program. Rosen himself is a 1996 Joe Cornell graduate.

If you grew up Jewish in suburban Detroit, you know what Joe Cornell is. Every fall, hundreds of sixth graders embark on the entertainment center’s 12 week dance class to get them ready for a full season of bar and bat mitzvahs. Zak Rosen has been following the progress of two Joe Cornell students, as they make their way through the program. Rosen himself is a 1996 Joe Cornell graduate.

Long before Israel went to war in Gaza and the anti-Semitic outbursts which followed in the streets of Europe, Italy’s Jews were already telling researchers that they found themselves increasingly under attack. A new study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, based on data collected through 2012, finds that over two-thirds of Italy’s Jews report a rise in anti-Semitism. These findings accord with similar surveys across the rest of Europe, most notably one compiled by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2013, which found that 76 percent of European Jews perceived anti-Semitism to have worsened in the last five years.

But the findings also diverge from other countries in Europe in an important way. Whereas studies in states like France have found that anti-Semitism resides predominantly among the Muslim population, the IJPR report found that Muslims played only a small role in Italy’s rising anti-Jewish sentiment. Instead, respondents fingered a different culprit: the left. This striking contrast can be seen in the table below:

Long before Israel went to war in Gaza and the anti-Semitic outbursts which followed in the streets of Europe, Italy’s Jews were already telling researchers that they found themselves increasingly under attack. A new study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, based on data collected through 2012, finds that over two-thirds of Italy’s Jews report a rise in anti-Semitism. These findings accord with similar surveys across the rest of Europe, most notably one compiled by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2013, which found that 76 percent of European Jews perceived anti-Semitism to have worsened in the last five years.

But the findings also diverge from other countries in Europe in an important way. Whereas studies in states like France have found that anti-Semitism resides predominantly among the Muslim population, the IJPR report found that Muslims played only a small role in Italy’s rising anti-Jewish sentiment. Instead, respondents fingered a different culprit: the left. This striking contrast can be seen in the table below:

Tablet contributor Andrew Marantz has a story in this week’s New Yorker about an unlikely artisanal mezuzah designer: architect Peter Pennoyer, whose classic, precise designs make him a sought-after name for the rich and famous looking to renovate. He’s also an Episcopalian, and came by his side project when an observant Jewish client whose Manhattan townhouse he was designing requested 52 mezuzot affixed throughout the new home.

Marantz explains that what Pennoyer found on the market wasn’t exactly up to his aesthetic standards:

Tablet contributor Andrew Marantz has a story in this week’s New Yorker about an unlikely artisanal mezuzah designer: architect Peter Pennoyer, whose classic, precise designs make him a sought-after name for the rich and famous looking to renovate. He’s also an Episcopalian, and came by his side project when an observant Jewish client whose Manhattan townhouse he was designing requested 52 mezuzot affixed throughout the new home.

Marantz explains that what Pennoyer found on the market wasn’t exactly up to his aesthetic standards:

Well, it happened. The terrorists—be they disgruntled North Koreans or disgruntled former employees with a truly apocalyptic regard for their own professional futures—have won. Amy Pascal, the embattled head of Sony whose private and professional emails formed the epicenter of the recent hacking scandal at the studio, has finally stepped down from her perch of authority. She’ll be forming her own production company under the Sony banner, which means she’ll be waiting around for a green-light with the rest of the poor schmucks down in development. Welcome, Amy!

What Amy’s true take on this will be undoubtedly known to herself only. Studio chiefs are professionally circumspect about such things; the spin becomes the reality. It’s totally possibly her departure was in the works prior to the hacking scandal—producing is creatively satisfying, after all, and as others have noted, Sony had its issues under Pascal’s leadership long before anyone knew what Scott Rudin really thought of Angelina Jolie. Studio heads are sort of like White House chiefs of staff—it’s not a question of if they’ll step down, but when.

Well, it happened. The terrorists—be they disgruntled North Koreans or disgruntled former employees with a truly apocalyptic regard for their own professional futures—have won. Amy Pascal, the embattled head of Sony whose private and professional emails formed the epicenter of the recent hacking scandal at the studio, has finally stepped down from her perch of authority. She’ll be forming her own production company under the Sony banner, which means she’ll be waiting around for a green-light with the rest of the poor schmucks down in development. Welcome, Amy!

What Amy’s true take on this will be undoubtedly known to herself only. Studio chiefs are professionally circumspect about such things; the spin becomes the reality. It’s totally possibly her departure was in the works prior to the hacking scandal—producing is creatively satisfying, after all, and as others have noted, Sony had its issues under Pascal’s leadership long before anyone knew what Scott Rudin really thought of Angelina Jolie. Studio heads are sort of like White House chiefs of staff—it’s not a question of if they’ll step down, but when.

In one of the greatest moments in the history of The Simpsons, Lisa is attending a jazz club with a friend, listening to a truly awful electric violinist torture her instrument. The friend protests, but Lisa is unfazed: “You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing,” she says.

She might as well have been talking about the Middle East. As pundits remind us daily, elections in Israel are scheduled for March—and Middle East peace, the health of U.S.-Israeli relations, and the future of the Jewish State all depend on who Israel’s next prime minister will be. But it’s the elections that aren’t happening right next door in the Palestinian Authority with which we should be truly concerned.

In one of the greatest moments in the history of The Simpsons, Lisa is attending a jazz club with a friend, listening to a truly awful electric violinist torture her instrument. The friend protests, but Lisa is unfazed: “You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing,” she says.

She might as well have been talking about the Middle East. As pundits remind us daily, elections in Israel are scheduled for March—and Middle East peace, the health of U.S.-Israeli relations, and the future of the Jewish State all depend on who Israel’s next prime minister will be. But it’s the elections that aren’t happening right next door in the Palestinian Authority with which we should be truly concerned.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188799/no-future-palestinian-leader/feed2Why Hollywood, and the Times' Sam Tanenhaus, Get Social Movements Like the March on Selma Wronghttp://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188796/mlk-hollywood-selma
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188796/mlk-hollywood-selma#commentsFri, 06 Feb 2015 05:00:15 +0000Todd Gitlinhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188796

The Movie and the Movement

With the advent of Ada DuVernay’s Selma, a robust debate has ensued about whether the movie is unfair to Lyndon Johnson. It’s an instructive debate, and its bite has not expired after the passage of 50 years.

With the advent of Ada DuVernay’s Selma, a robust debate has ensued about whether the movie is unfair to Lyndon Johnson. It’s an instructive debate, and its bite has not expired after the passage of 50 years.

“Pack peddlers,” known in other parts of the world as smous, ambulantes, kloppers, weekly men, and a host of other names, are a staple of Jewish family lore everyplace that Jews headed when they left Europe starting in the 19th century.

“Pack peddlers,” known in other parts of the world as smous, ambulantes, kloppers, weekly men, and a host of other names, are a staple of Jewish family lore everyplace that Jews headed when they left Europe starting in the 19th century.

There’s no question sexual assault on college campuses is a major issue, a troubling epidemic that demands not only activism but institutionalized responses from universities across the country. While universities have begun implementing preventative programming and reevaluating their methods of handling rapes and assaults, what the campus sexual assault culture pervasive today also requires is a reliable, stable support system for victims.

The Jewish Week’s Amy Sara Clark reports on several new initiatives within the Jewish community both to help victims and change how colleges campuses address and deal with sexual assault. Clark cites Hillel initiatives like the sexual assault workshop offered through its Ask Big Questions program, as well as a partnership with the San Francisco-based non-profit Shalom Bayit, which addresses domestic violence within the Jewish community.

There’s no question sexual assault on college campuses is a major issue, a troubling epidemic that demands not only activism but institutionalized responses from universities across the country. While universities have begun implementing preventative programming and reevaluating their methods of handling rapes and assaults, what the campus sexual assault culture pervasive today also requires is a reliable, stable support system for victims.

The Jewish Week’s Amy Sara Clark reports on several new initiatives within the Jewish community both to help victims and change how colleges campuses address and deal with sexual assault. Clark cites Hillel initiatives like the sexual assault workshop offered through its Ask Big Questions program, as well as a partnership with the San Francisco-based non-profit Shalom Bayit, which addresses domestic violence within the Jewish community.

The regal Miss Dior herself, Natalie Portman, is back with her newest ad for the perfume, in which she flees what looks like a perfectly good wedding in France to get on a helicopter with a mystery man. Her dad looks royally pissed. Her real-life husband Benjamin Millepied, who is reportedly busy converting to Judaism, probably isn’t pleased either. (Just kidding, he supports her unconditionally in her professional endeavors and thinks the perfume smells great.)

It’s obvious things are going to go south for the potential Dior newlyweds from the start: Portman’s on-camera dad forgot to wear his lucky yarmulke!

The regal Miss Dior herself, Natalie Portman, is back with her newest ad for the perfume, in which she flees what looks like a perfectly good wedding in France to get on a helicopter with a mystery man. Her dad looks royally pissed. Her real-life husband Benjamin Millepied, who is reportedly busy converting to Judaism, probably isn’t pleased either. (Just kidding, he supports her unconditionally in her professional endeavors and thinks the perfume smells great.)

It’s obvious things are going to go south for the potential Dior newlyweds from the start: Portman’s on-camera dad forgot to wear his lucky yarmulke!

JTA reports on the recently released Greater Seattle Jewish Community Study, which recorded a whopping 70 percent increase in the city’s Jewish population since 2001. (The 2000-2001 estimate was 37,180 Jewish people; this year’s survey recorded 63,400.)

It’s not the only recent jump in Jewish population growth in the Pacific Northwest—in 2011, a Jewish Federation census reported a Jewish population of Portland, Ore. nearly double the size of what community members had been estimating (47,500 as opposed to an oft-cited, and apparently well outdated, 25,000 figure).

JTA reports on the recently released Greater Seattle Jewish Community Study, which recorded a whopping 70 percent increase in the city’s Jewish population since 2001. (The 2000-2001 estimate was 37,180 Jewish people; this year’s survey recorded 63,400.)

It’s not the only recent jump in Jewish population growth in the Pacific Northwest—in 2011, a Jewish Federation census reported a Jewish population of Portland, Ore. nearly double the size of what community members had been estimating (47,500 as opposed to an oft-cited, and apparently well outdated, 25,000 figure).

The point of burning alive Jordanian pilot First Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh was to outrage onlookers, including his family—but especially the members of his large tribe, the Bararsheh, in southern Jordan. The Jordanian tribes form the core of support for the Hashemite kingdom against the Palestinian West Bankers, who may constitute the country’s majority. The East Bankers are also the bulwarks of Jordan’s internal and external security, with both the armed forces and security services made up almost exclusively of tribal members.

To be sure, Kasasbeh’s clansmen are going to be very angry with the Islamic State for killing him in such a gruesome manner. What IS seems to betting on is that Kasasbeh’s death was so gruesome, and so evocative of the hellfire that awaits false believers, that the dead pilot’s tribe, a pillar of the Hashemite monarchy, is likely going to be shocked into wondering whether King Abdullah has pulled them into the wrong war, on behalf of a frivolous and potentially treacherous ally—the United States.

The point of burning alive Jordanian pilot First Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh was to outrage onlookers, including his family—but especially the members of his large tribe, the Bararsheh, in southern Jordan. The Jordanian tribes form the core of support for the Hashemite kingdom against the Palestinian West Bankers, who may constitute the country’s majority. The East Bankers are also the bulwarks of Jordan’s internal and external security, with both the armed forces and security services made up almost exclusively of tribal members.

To be sure, Kasasbeh’s clansmen are going to be very angry with the Islamic State for killing him in such a gruesome manner. What IS seems to betting on is that Kasasbeh’s death was so gruesome, and so evocative of the hellfire that awaits false believers, that the dead pilot’s tribe, a pillar of the Hashemite monarchy, is likely going to be shocked into wondering whether King Abdullah has pulled them into the wrong war, on behalf of a frivolous and potentially treacherous ally—the United States.

Entering “The Left Front,” the exhibition of political art from the 1930s, currently at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery through April 4, is to enter a foreign—but not completely unfamiliar—world populated by militant workers, capitalist fat cats, and impoverished slum dwellers. Breadlines alternate with demonstrations. Cities appear desolate, factories are monstrous. The French commune is the subject for a Marxist version of a Classics Illustrated comic book.

The prints and paintings on the gallery walls depict civil war in Spain and Jim Crow atrocities at home; there are continuous 16mm movies of May Day parades and rallies in New York’s Union Square as documented by John Albok, an amateur photographer and professional tailor born, like a significant number of the artists here, in the East European Jewish outback. Albok’s documentation of the 1937 parade is in color, but almost everything else is black and white—and not just because the lithograph is a favored medium.

Entering “The Left Front,” the exhibition of political art from the 1930s, currently at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery through April 4, is to enter a foreign—but not completely unfamiliar—world populated by militant workers, capitalist fat cats, and impoverished slum dwellers. Breadlines alternate with demonstrations. Cities appear desolate, factories are monstrous. The French commune is the subject for a Marxist version of a Classics Illustrated comic book.

The prints and paintings on the gallery walls depict civil war in Spain and Jim Crow atrocities at home; there are continuous 16mm movies of May Day parades and rallies in New York’s Union Square as documented by John Albok, an amateur photographer and professional tailor born, like a significant number of the artists here, in the East European Jewish outback. Albok’s documentation of the 1937 parade is in color, but almost everything else is black and white—and not just because the lithograph is a favored medium.

A Haaretzpoll published Monday found that if elections in Israel were held this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would beat the Labor camp by two seats, winning 25 seats, while the Tzipi-Bougie camp would lag behind with 23 seats, ultimately enabling Netanyahu to be re-elected as Israel’s Prime Minister for the fourth time. This poll comes as a surprise, not only because of earlier polls suggesting the joint Tzipi Livni-Isaac “Bougie” Herzog party could win, but because of the most recent scandal to rock the Prime Minister’s bid for a fourth term in office (which would make him the only Prime Minister to hold power for that long since David Ben-Gurion).

It’s being called bottlegate. And it’s Bibi’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, who’s at the heart of the story.

A Haaretzpoll published Monday found that if elections in Israel were held this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would beat the Labor camp by two seats, winning 25 seats, while the Tzipi-Bougie camp would lag behind with 23 seats, ultimately enabling Netanyahu to be re-elected as Israel’s Prime Minister for the fourth time. This poll comes as a surprise, not only because of earlier polls suggesting the joint Tzipi Livni-Isaac “Bougie” Herzog party could win, but because of the most recent scandal to rock the Prime Minister’s bid for a fourth term in office (which would make him the only Prime Minister to hold power for that long since David Ben-Gurion).

It’s being called bottlegate. And it’s Bibi’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, who’s at the heart of the story.

When I was little, I adored Cool Whip. My mom was a hippie, and didn’t use it very often—just when she made one of her canned-mandarin-orange-and-grape-half-filled Jell-O molds for someone’s Yom Kippur break-fast party. “I liked it because it was easier to use than whipped cream,” she told me. “If you don’t pay attention when you whip cream, it turns into butter. Cool Whip was always the exact same consistency.”

Yes! A child-delighting, airy-yet-gooey, perfect, unfound-in-nature divine consistency! But Cool Whip was a treat we rarely got to have when not folded into lime-green Jell-O. We kept kosher, and Cool Whip has always been certified kosher, but my mom knew that though the container said “Non-Dairy” the product actually contained caseinate—milk protein. Back then, even though the FDA considered it non-dairy according to its own arcane rules (it was lactose-free), kashrut-observant Jews considered it dairy because of the caseinate.

When I was little, I adored Cool Whip. My mom was a hippie, and didn’t use it very often—just when she made one of her canned-mandarin-orange-and-grape-half-filled Jell-O molds for someone’s Yom Kippur break-fast party. “I liked it because it was easier to use than whipped cream,” she told me. “If you don’t pay attention when you whip cream, it turns into butter. Cool Whip was always the exact same consistency.”

Yes! A child-delighting, airy-yet-gooey, perfect, unfound-in-nature divine consistency! But Cool Whip was a treat we rarely got to have when not folded into lime-green Jell-O. We kept kosher, and Cool Whip has always been certified kosher, but my mom knew that though the container said “Non-Dairy” the product actually contained caseinate—milk protein. Back then, even though the FDA considered it non-dairy according to its own arcane rules (it was lactose-free), kashrut-observant Jews considered it dairy because of the caseinate.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188780/cool-whip-is-kosher-but-whats-actually-in-it/feed1How to Celebrate the New Year of the Trees: A Tu B'Shevat Guidehttp://tabletmag.com/scroll/188763/how-to-celebrate-the-new-year-of-the-trees
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188763/how-to-celebrate-the-new-year-of-the-trees#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 16:28:47 +0000Gabriela Geselowitzhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188763

Happy Tu B’Shevat! Known as the New Year of the Trees, or even Jewish Arbor Day, this holiday is a Jewish celebration of nature and the coming of spring (even though it may not feel like it in the United States). You can learn more about the festival here.

Many people make a seder for erev Tu B’Shevat, though they’re less structured than their Passover equivalents in virtually every way. If you’d like to throw a holiday shindig of your own, try serving some fig bread in honor of the ancient holiday custom of eating dried fruits and preserves—here’s a recipe inspired by the fig bread made by the Jews of Spain). Seder traditions include eating foods with the traditional Seven Species of Israel, and this recipe gets you about 14 percent of the way there. Another seder tradition is drinking white wine and gradually transitioning to red, so you can break out the Moscato and the Manischewitz.

Happy Tu B’Shevat! Known as the New Year of the Trees, or even Jewish Arbor Day, this holiday is a Jewish celebration of nature and the coming of spring (even though it may not feel like it in the United States). You can learn more about the festival here.

Many people make a seder for erev Tu B’Shevat, though they’re less structured than their Passover equivalents in virtually every way. If you’d like to throw a holiday shindig of your own, try serving some fig bread in honor of the ancient holiday custom of eating dried fruits and preserves—here’s a recipe inspired by the fig bread made by the Jews of Spain). Seder traditions include eating foods with the traditional Seven Species of Israel, and this recipe gets you about 14 percent of the way there. Another seder tradition is drinking white wine and gradually transitioning to red, so you can break out the Moscato and the Manischewitz.

In another dramatic turn in the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, investigators announced Tuesday that the prosecutor had written the draft of arrest warrants for Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, the New York Timesreports.

Before his death, Nisman was treading new territory in his years-long investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 people. He was found with a gunshot wound to the head hours before he was supposed to present evidence implicating Kirchner in covering up Iran’s alleged involvement in the attack.

In another dramatic turn in the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, investigators announced Tuesday that the prosecutor had written the draft of arrest warrants for Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, the New York Timesreports.

Before his death, Nisman was treading new territory in his years-long investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 people. He was found with a gunshot wound to the head hours before he was supposed to present evidence implicating Kirchner in covering up Iran’s alleged involvement in the attack.

It is after hours at a small café in Montreal’s fashionable Mile End neighborhood. The whirring espresso machine has been shut down for the evening, and a long wooden communal table is dotted with plates of pickled turnips and olives and glass jars filled with fragrant dried limes, cardamom pods, and cinnamon sticks. Before long, approximately 30 guests arrive to meet the parade of plates emerging from the tiny kitchen: curried chickpea sambusak (fried turnovers), a sweet-and-sour eggplant dish called engreeyeh, semolina kubbeh dumplings served in pumpkin stew, and an almond-milk pudding flavored with rosewater.

Between courses two women, Sydney Warshaw and Katherine Romanow, share anecdotes about the Iraqi Jewish-inspired dishes being served and remind attendees to take home the tiny bottles of Iraqi spice mix set at their plates. The next morning, the café will resume its espresso-and-foamed-milk routine. But for one evening, the scene more closely resembles a Shabbat dinner in Baghdad.

It is after hours at a small café in Montreal’s fashionable Mile End neighborhood. The whirring espresso machine has been shut down for the evening, and a long wooden communal table is dotted with plates of pickled turnips and olives and glass jars filled with fragrant dried limes, cardamom pods, and cinnamon sticks. Before long, approximately 30 guests arrive to meet the parade of plates emerging from the tiny kitchen: curried chickpea sambusak (fried turnovers), a sweet-and-sour eggplant dish called engreeyeh, semolina kubbeh dumplings served in pumpkin stew, and an almond-milk pudding flavored with rosewater.

Between courses two women, Sydney Warshaw and Katherine Romanow, share anecdotes about the Iraqi Jewish-inspired dishes being served and remind attendees to take home the tiny bottles of Iraqi spice mix set at their plates. The next morning, the café will resume its espresso-and-foamed-milk routine. But for one evening, the scene more closely resembles a Shabbat dinner in Baghdad.

It was an intimate wedding at our local park where we take the dogs to run and where we throw our crusted sins into the stream each year on Rosh Hashanah. Between the couple, some of their friends and relatives, my wife, and me, we numbered just 10.

I led a niggun and shared a teaching from the Vilna Gaon about love. Blessings were made, vows and rings exchanged. The bride and groom stepped on a glass, triggering shouts of “Mazel tov!” Like many weddings I’ve done in 22 years as a rabbi, this was a beautiful seal placed upon a love that was meant to be. Sort of. For the couple, it was their long-awaited marriage. For me, it was a heart-wrenching divorce. The bride was Jewish; the groom wasn’t. To marry them, I had to leave the Conservative movement.

It was an intimate wedding at our local park where we take the dogs to run and where we throw our crusted sins into the stream each year on Rosh Hashanah. Between the couple, some of their friends and relatives, my wife, and me, we numbered just 10.

I led a niggun and shared a teaching from the Vilna Gaon about love. Blessings were made, vows and rings exchanged. The bride and groom stepped on a glass, triggering shouts of “Mazel tov!” Like many weddings I’ve done in 22 years as a rabbi, this was a beautiful seal placed upon a love that was meant to be. Sort of. For the couple, it was their long-awaited marriage. For me, it was a heart-wrenching divorce. The bride was Jewish; the groom wasn’t. To marry them, I had to leave the Conservative movement.

ISIS has reportedly executed another prisoner, a Jordanian pilot named Muath al-Kasasbeh, who was captured by ISIS in December. A video purporting to show him being burned alive by masked militants appeared online today, several days after ISIS released footage appearing to show Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, being beheaded.

The Jordanian government had agreed to ISIS’s request that they release an al Qaida prisoner held in Jordan, but negotiations fell through after ISIS refused to consider the release al-Kasasbeh in return. The method of killing marks a shift for the group, which has previously beheaded its foreign hostages.

ISIS has reportedly executed another prisoner, a Jordanian pilot named Muath al-Kasasbeh, who was captured by ISIS in December. A video purporting to show him being burned alive by masked militants appeared online today, several days after ISIS released footage appearing to show Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, being beheaded.

The Jordanian government had agreed to ISIS’s request that they release an al Qaida prisoner held in Jordan, but negotiations fell through after ISIS refused to consider the release al-Kasasbeh in return. The method of killing marks a shift for the group, which has previously beheaded its foreign hostages.

In Israel, Tu B’Shevat is heralded by the white blossoms bursting from the bare branches of the almond trees, filling the air with the sweet perfume of spring. Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, is celebrated with fruits and nuts that have been gathered and saved from the summer harvest. Since the times of ancient Israel, fruits were preserved in varied ways. Fruit syrups or “honeys” were cooked from dates, figs, grapes, carobs, and pomegranates. Jams were made from sour cherries, bitter oranges, baby eggplants, and carrots. They were flavored with cardamom, rosewater, and saffron. Dried dates and figs were pressed into leathers and cakes for later consumption. In the early spring, fruits that had been stored in this way would be presented at the festive Tu B’Shevat meal.

For the ancient Israelites, Tu B’Shevat was the beginning of the time period when the fruit tithes for the Temple in Jerusalem began to be calculated. After the destruction of the Second Temple, this tax was symbolically transferred to a coin, much like in the pidyon haben ceremony marking the redemption of firstborn boys. Tu B’Shevat evolved into a mystical holiday. The kabbalists created a Tu B’Shevat Seder featuring fruits from the Land of Israel.

In Israel, Tu B’Shevat is heralded by the white blossoms bursting from the bare branches of the almond trees, filling the air with the sweet perfume of spring. Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, is celebrated with fruits and nuts that have been gathered and saved from the summer harvest. Since the times of ancient Israel, fruits were preserved in varied ways. Fruit syrups or “honeys” were cooked from dates, figs, grapes, carobs, and pomegranates. Jams were made from sour cherries, bitter oranges, baby eggplants, and carrots. They were flavored with cardamom, rosewater, and saffron. Dried dates and figs were pressed into leathers and cakes for later consumption. In the early spring, fruits that had been stored in this way would be presented at the festive Tu B’Shevat meal.

For the ancient Israelites, Tu B’Shevat was the beginning of the time period when the fruit tithes for the Temple in Jerusalem began to be calculated. After the destruction of the Second Temple, this tax was symbolically transferred to a coin, much like in the pidyon haben ceremony marking the redemption of firstborn boys. Tu B’Shevat evolved into a mystical holiday. The kabbalists created a Tu B’Shevat Seder featuring fruits from the Land of Israel.

Jill Soloway fans rejoice, for the genius behind Transparent has a new project in the works. According to Variety, the as-yet-untitled show follows two women who bond “over their enthusiasm for feminism.” They share a second trait, too: both were hit by lightning a decade earlier after first meeting at summer camp.

The project will team Soloway with Ashley Skidmore and Lyle Friedman, the duo that writes and stars in the web-series #hotmessmoves.

Jill Soloway fans rejoice, for the genius behind Transparent has a new project in the works. According to Variety, the as-yet-untitled show follows two women who bond “over their enthusiasm for feminism.” They share a second trait, too: both were hit by lightning a decade earlier after first meeting at summer camp.

The project will team Soloway with Ashley Skidmore and Lyle Friedman, the duo that writes and stars in the web-series #hotmessmoves.

A man attacked three members of the French military on an anti-terror patrol near Consistoire Israélite de Nice, a Jewish community center in Nice, in the south of France. Two of the soldiers were wounded, French officials announced Tuesday.

The assailant was arrested and is in police custody. According to officials, two other people who were with the attacker fled the scene. The condition of the two wounded soldiers is not yet known.

A man attacked three members of the French military on an anti-terror patrol near Consistoire Israélite de Nice, a Jewish community center in Nice, in the south of France. Two of the soldiers were wounded, French officials announced Tuesday.

The assailant was arrested and is in police custody. According to officials, two other people who were with the attacker fled the scene. The condition of the two wounded soldiers is not yet known.

Every snarky word I’ve ever written (and believe me, there have been a considerable number) about Downton Abbey and its creator Julian Fellowes’ staunch refusal to ever let anything that might be less than flattering to modern ears slip through an aristocrat’s congenitally stiffened upper lip: the noticeable lack of concern over Cora’s paternal Levinson-ness; the less than a flicker of any sense that perhaps the plight of those newly impoverished post-Revolution Russian refugees might feel slightly less tragic if one paused to consider the brutal oppression and systematic terror those of their class had inflicted on their countrymen for generations. (I’m not saying Communism was perfect, Miss Bunting; I’m saying there was, at one point, a fairly logical reason for it.)

Every snarky word I’ve ever written (and believe me, there have been a considerable number) about Downton Abbey and its creator Julian Fellowes’ staunch refusal to ever let anything that might be less than flattering to modern ears slip through an aristocrat’s congenitally stiffened upper lip: the noticeable lack of concern over Cora’s paternal Levinson-ness; the less than a flicker of any sense that perhaps the plight of those newly impoverished post-Revolution Russian refugees might feel slightly less tragic if one paused to consider the brutal oppression and systematic terror those of their class had inflicted on their countrymen for generations. (I’m not saying Communism was perfect, Miss Bunting; I’m saying there was, at one point, a fairly logical reason for it.)

In general, I think I’m a decent parent. My kids don’t set the cats on fire. They impress waiters with their politeness. They have never seen an episode of Dance Moms.

But I’ve fallen down on the job when it comes to teaching them about money. The girls (Josie, 13, and Maxine, 10) have an allowance, but my husband and I have never established what, precisely, the allowance is for, or why it should be a certain amount, and we almost always forget to give it to them anyway. We talk about charity and have a lovely tzedakah box, but when asked, neither of my kids could say where I donate money. (“Probably something Jewish,” Maxine said. “We did that Kiva thing once?” Josie said.) The girls aren’t materialistic (they don’t care about brand names, don’t ask for expensive toys or clothes, and know I’ll never buy anything with a logo on it), but if they do ask for new jeans because their old ones are making them look like Pee-wee Herman, I pay up with no discussion. I get the jeans from Old Navy and Uniqlo, which means they’re affordable … but do the kids know that? Why hadn’t I ever thought, before writing this article, to have a discussion about how much jeans can conceivably cost?

In general, I think I’m a decent parent. My kids don’t set the cats on fire. They impress waiters with their politeness. They have never seen an episode of Dance Moms.

But I’ve fallen down on the job when it comes to teaching them about money. The girls (Josie, 13, and Maxine, 10) have an allowance, but my husband and I have never established what, precisely, the allowance is for, or why it should be a certain amount, and we almost always forget to give it to them anyway. We talk about charity and have a lovely tzedakah box, but when asked, neither of my kids could say where I donate money. (“Probably something Jewish,” Maxine said. “We did that Kiva thing once?” Josie said.) The girls aren’t materialistic (they don’t care about brand names, don’t ask for expensive toys or clothes, and know I’ll never buy anything with a logo on it), but if they do ask for new jeans because their old ones are making them look like Pee-wee Herman, I pay up with no discussion. I get the jeans from Old Navy and Uniqlo, which means they’re affordable … but do the kids know that? Why hadn’t I ever thought, before writing this article, to have a discussion about how much jeans can conceivably cost?

Trees have always held a special place in Judaism—from the Tree of Life depicted in Jewish liturgy and iconography to this week’s annual observance of Tu B’Shevat. In fact, trees are considered so important to Jews that the sage Shimon bar Yochai taught that “if you are holding a sapling in your hand, and someone says that the Messiah has drawn near, first plant the sapling, and then go and greet the Messiah.” (Avot d’Rebbe Natan 31b)

In the modern Jewish imagination, tree-planting is inexorably tied to the State of Israel and the Jewish National Fund’s iconic blue collection boxes. However, many people don’t realize that Jews were active participants in what became known as America’s own “Tree Army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps program of the 1930s. Each year, thousands of young Jewish men were among those who planted 3 billion saplings from Montana to South Carolina. Along the way, the Jews of the CCC explored unfamiliar parts of the country and shed remnants of their immigrant selves, and for the first time embraced both their American and Jewish identities.

Trees have always held a special place in Judaism—from the Tree of Life depicted in Jewish liturgy and iconography to this week’s annual observance of Tu B’Shevat. In fact, trees are considered so important to Jews that the sage Shimon bar Yochai taught that “if you are holding a sapling in your hand, and someone says that the Messiah has drawn near, first plant the sapling, and then go and greet the Messiah.” (Avot d’Rebbe Natan 31b)

In the modern Jewish imagination, tree-planting is inexorably tied to the State of Israel and the Jewish National Fund’s iconic blue collection boxes. However, many people don’t realize that Jews were active participants in what became known as America’s own “Tree Army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps program of the 1930s. Each year, thousands of young Jewish men were among those who planted 3 billion saplings from Montana to South Carolina. Along the way, the Jews of the CCC explored unfamiliar parts of the country and shed remnants of their immigrant selves, and for the first time embraced both their American and Jewish identities.

Making sense of the Israeli elections is a difficult task. With a vast array of political parties to choose from, and with each throwing blame and pointing fingers at the others, the election season can be confusing, disheartening, and terribly amusing for news consumers and voters alike.

More than in past election years, the main arena for the March 2015 election is the Internet. Viral campaign videos are being released on social media platforms and have become candidates’ main tool for spreading political messages, getting back at opponents, and getting voters “engaged.” While this year’s videos are just as humorous—or not, depending on who’s watching—as in past years, they’ve sparked legal controversies as campaign season heats up.

Making sense of the Israeli elections is a difficult task. With a vast array of political parties to choose from, and with each throwing blame and pointing fingers at the others, the election season can be confusing, disheartening, and terribly amusing for news consumers and voters alike.

More than in past election years, the main arena for the March 2015 election is the Internet. Viral campaign videos are being released on social media platforms and have become candidates’ main tool for spreading political messages, getting back at opponents, and getting voters “engaged.” While this year’s videos are just as humorous—or not, depending on who’s watching—as in past years, they’ve sparked legal controversies as campaign season heats up.

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz may have just passed, but attempts to pursue a degree of justice for the horrors committed during the Holocaust aren’t over. Two nonagenarians could face prison time for their roles as Nazis guards, JTA reports.

Hamburg prosecutors announced today that they are investigating 93-year-old Hilde Michnia in connection with war crimes committed during the Holocaust. Michnia, née Lisiewicz, worked as a guard at both the Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen concentration camps. She served a year in prison after the war for cruelty, including beating and threatening to murder prisoners. The current investigation examines her role in a death march from Gross-Rosen that resulted in the deaths of 1,400 women, and she could be charged with accessory to murder. Michnia has maintained that in Bergen-Belsen she worked only in the kitchens, and did not witness or know of the treatment and murder of Jews in the camp.

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz may have just passed, but attempts to pursue a degree of justice for the horrors committed during the Holocaust aren’t over. Two nonagenarians could face prison time for their roles as Nazis guards, JTA reports.

Hamburg prosecutors announced today that they are investigating 93-year-old Hilde Michnia in connection with war crimes committed during the Holocaust. Michnia, née Lisiewicz, worked as a guard at both the Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen concentration camps. She served a year in prison after the war for cruelty, including beating and threatening to murder prisoners. The current investigation examines her role in a death march from Gross-Rosen that resulted in the deaths of 1,400 women, and she could be charged with accessory to murder. Michnia has maintained that in Bergen-Belsen she worked only in the kitchens, and did not witness or know of the treatment and murder of Jews in the camp.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188736/female-nazi-guard-now-93-under-investigation/feed0Chocolate Bark Recipes for Tu B'Shevat, the New Year of the Treeshttp://tabletmag.com/scroll/188711/celebrate-tu-bshevat-with-chocolate-bark
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188711/celebrate-tu-bshevat-with-chocolate-bark#commentsMon, 02 Feb 2015 20:10:29 +0000Rachel Harkhamhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188711

Wouldn’t it be fun to celebrate the sweet, bright, optimistic holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish festival of trees and nature and rebirth, with a meal that featured a fresh fruit or vegetable in each of its courses—all bursting with ethereal symbolism and earthly blessings? But let’s be real: For those like me who live in the American Northeast, Tu B’Shevat falls right in the heart of winter. And the only fresh snap to be had these days come from bootsteps on the ice and some people’s wintery attitudes.

But chocolate is always in season. Winter offers the best conditions for chocolate making—and given people’s seasonally affected moods, it’s probably when it’s most necessary. It would be a shame to let Tu B’Shevat pass without some acknowledgement of the flavorful offerings of nature. Dried fruit and nuts are tasty and healthy cold season snacks. They become fantastic treats when they are toppings on your favorite variety of chocolate. Chocolate bark can satisfy any hibernal hankering—and it can also count as a Tu B’Shevat mitzvah.

Wouldn’t it be fun to celebrate the sweet, bright, optimistic holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish festival of trees and nature and rebirth, with a meal that featured a fresh fruit or vegetable in each of its courses—all bursting with ethereal symbolism and earthly blessings? But let’s be real: For those like me who live in the American Northeast, Tu B’Shevat falls right in the heart of winter. And the only fresh snap to be had these days come from bootsteps on the ice and some people’s wintery attitudes.

But chocolate is always in season. Winter offers the best conditions for chocolate making—and given people’s seasonally affected moods, it’s probably when it’s most necessary. It would be a shame to let Tu B’Shevat pass without some acknowledgement of the flavorful offerings of nature. Dried fruit and nuts are tasty and healthy cold season snacks. They become fantastic treats when they are toppings on your favorite variety of chocolate. Chocolate bark can satisfy any hibernal hankering—and it can also count as a Tu B’Shevat mitzvah.

If you enjoyed Seinfeld in the 1990s and Curb Your Enthusiasm in the past decade—both the watching of episodes and the inevitable quoting and referencing that follow—it’s likely that your sense of comedy, and perhaps your attunement to social etiquette, has been influenced by the vision of Larry David.

Anna D. Shapiro, the Tony Award-winning director at the helm of David’s new Broadway show, Fish in the Dark, which begins performances at the Cort Theatre Feb. 2, is well educated in the school of David. “He’s been really formative in the culture of my humor,” she said. That familiarity contributed to what she called a “shared space” as she and David began to develop and rehearse the play, which marks David’s entry into professional theater as both a writer and actor.

If you enjoyed Seinfeld in the 1990s and Curb Your Enthusiasm in the past decade—both the watching of episodes and the inevitable quoting and referencing that follow—it’s likely that your sense of comedy, and perhaps your attunement to social etiquette, has been influenced by the vision of Larry David.

Anna D. Shapiro, the Tony Award-winning director at the helm of David’s new Broadway show, Fish in the Dark, which begins performances at the Cort Theatre Feb. 2, is well educated in the school of David. “He’s been really formative in the culture of my humor,” she said. That familiarity contributed to what she called a “shared space” as she and David began to develop and rehearse the play, which marks David’s entry into professional theater as both a writer and actor.

Now is the time of year when the well-heeled jet-setters of the world, finally exhausted of being exhausted after the whirl of the holidays, pack their bags and set off for their annual lavish skiing holidays in Gstaad, Klosters, Verbier, and…Tehran? Ex-squeeze me? No, you’re reading right. According to Vogue, Tehran is the next big thing. It could even be (gasp) the next Aspen, if Colorado were to unexpectedly pass a law declaring all female skiiers must be accompanied on the slopes by a male family member to safeguard her morals and remind her that the sense of freedom one experiences on a particularly good downhill run is nothing but a cruel illusion. One simply doesn’t go off-piste in the Islamic Republic.

This tidbit, naturally, is left out of the Vogue piece, written in its typically knowing yet breathless house style. It’s tempting, of course, to chalk up these omissions—and possibly, the editorial judgment behind publishing a piece extolling the virtues of a place a large portions of Vogue’s readership is a) unable to fly to commercially b) would not be admitted even if they could somehow reach it and c) has been under sanctions for the better part of the past 30 years due to its horrific repression of dissent, human rights violations, and totalitarian regime—to the magazine’s typically fluffy treatment of global issues (remember that Asma al-Assad profile, anyone?).

Now is the time of year when the well-heeled jet-setters of the world, finally exhausted of being exhausted after the whirl of the holidays, pack their bags and set off for their annual lavish skiing holidays in Gstaad, Klosters, Verbier, and…Tehran? Ex-squeeze me? No, you’re reading right. According to Vogue, Tehran is the next big thing. It could even be (gasp) the next Aspen, if Colorado were to unexpectedly pass a law declaring all female skiiers must be accompanied on the slopes by a male family member to safeguard her morals and remind her that the sense of freedom one experiences on a particularly good downhill run is nothing but a cruel illusion. One simply doesn’t go off-piste in the Islamic Republic.

This tidbit, naturally, is left out of the Vogue piece, written in its typically knowing yet breathless house style. It’s tempting, of course, to chalk up these omissions—and possibly, the editorial judgment behind publishing a piece extolling the virtues of a place a large portions of Vogue’s readership is a) unable to fly to commercially b) would not be admitted even if they could somehow reach it and c) has been under sanctions for the better part of the past 30 years due to its horrific repression of dissent, human rights violations, and totalitarian regime—to the magazine’s typically fluffy treatment of global issues (remember that Asma al-Assad profile, anyone?).

At the Met stands a life-size marble statue of the biblical figure Adam carved by the Italian artist Tullio Lombardo (1455–1532). Adam stands with a serene gaze and relaxed body language, his weight transferred elegantly across his torso and hips. Lombardo appropriated the pose from classical antiquity in order to meet the requirements of the pope who hired him to somehow create a human being beautiful enough to be considered a god incarnate.

Lombardo accomplished this higher-order task with a most subtle compositional effect and with some pretty fancy chiseling. He abraded or irritated the surface of the marble and then polished it until a sublime magical light—literally and allegorically—began to overtake the mass, radiating from inside and reflecting off the outside. Finally the brittle stone is re-perceived (and re-conceived) as flexible matter—matter with the properties of skin, cartilage, musculature, bones—plus an ethereal effervescence.

At the Met stands a life-size marble statue of the biblical figure Adam carved by the Italian artist Tullio Lombardo (1455–1532). Adam stands with a serene gaze and relaxed body language, his weight transferred elegantly across his torso and hips. Lombardo appropriated the pose from classical antiquity in order to meet the requirements of the pope who hired him to somehow create a human being beautiful enough to be considered a god incarnate.

Lombardo accomplished this higher-order task with a most subtle compositional effect and with some pretty fancy chiseling. He abraded or irritated the surface of the marble and then polished it until a sublime magical light—literally and allegorically—began to overtake the mass, radiating from inside and reflecting off the outside. Finally the brittle stone is re-perceived (and re-conceived) as flexible matter—matter with the properties of skin, cartilage, musculature, bones—plus an ethereal effervescence.

One day, sometime in the 1970s, poet and thinker David Antin walked into an auditorium at Pomona College, in Southern California, to deliver a reading. This time, however, he did not bring the traditional paraphernalia poets bring with them to such occasions: books with folded pages, manuscripts, notepads, scraps, or any other texts to read off from. Instead, he cleared his throat, and began to speak—to improvise, spontaneously weaving together ideas and images, anecdotes and insights. Afterwards, replaying the tape of the recorded performance during their drive home, the poet’s wife, performance artist and filmmaker Elly Antin, pronounced: “That’s a poem.”

How Long Is the Present, published last month by the University of New Mexico Press is a selection of transcribed talks, known as the “talk poems,” which Antin gave during the period from the mid-1970s to the early ’90s. The volume also includes a thorough introduction by Stephen Fredman, as well as a recent interview with the author, who turned 83 this week.

One day, sometime in the 1970s, poet and thinker David Antin walked into an auditorium at Pomona College, in Southern California, to deliver a reading. This time, however, he did not bring the traditional paraphernalia poets bring with them to such occasions: books with folded pages, manuscripts, notepads, scraps, or any other texts to read off from. Instead, he cleared his throat, and began to speak—to improvise, spontaneously weaving together ideas and images, anecdotes and insights. Afterwards, replaying the tape of the recorded performance during their drive home, the poet’s wife, performance artist and filmmaker Elly Antin, pronounced: “That’s a poem.”

How Long Is the Present, published last month by the University of New Mexico Press is a selection of transcribed talks, known as the “talk poems,” which Antin gave during the period from the mid-1970s to the early ’90s. The volume also includes a thorough introduction by Stephen Fredman, as well as a recent interview with the author, who turned 83 this week.

Brandeis President Fred Lawrence announced his resignation today in a letter published on the university’s website. “After careful consideration, and in close consultation with the Board of Trustees,” Lawrence wrote, “I have decided to step down as President at the end of this, my fifth academic year.”

Lawrence’s tenure hasn’t been without drama. In April 2014, Lawrence drew criticism for the university’s decision, under his leadership, to revoke an honorary degree set to be awarded to the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali. More recently, Lawrence has come under fire for his handling of a campus controversy that began when a student named Daniel Mael published a fellow student’s anti-NYPD tweets, and which quickly escalated to a contentious battle over the limits of free speech.

Brandeis President Fred Lawrence announced his resignation today in a letter published on the university’s website. “After careful consideration, and in close consultation with the Board of Trustees,” Lawrence wrote, “I have decided to step down as President at the end of this, my fifth academic year.”

Lawrence’s tenure hasn’t been without drama. In April 2014, Lawrence drew criticism for the university’s decision, under his leadership, to revoke an honorary degree set to be awarded to the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali. More recently, Lawrence has come under fire for his handling of a campus controversy that began when a student named Daniel Mael published a fellow student’s anti-NYPD tweets, and which quickly escalated to a contentious battle over the limits of free speech.

According to some Lebanese analysts I spoke with this afternoon, the main point of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s much-anticipated speech today was that the Golan Heights would be Hezbollah’s, and therefore Iran’s, next arena of activity. That’s a marked change from his last public speech, delivered more than two weeks ago, when he reassured Hezbollah’s Shia constituency, which is anxious about fighting in Syria to defend Bashar al-Assad, that the organization was not active on the Golan Heights at all. The Israeli strike on a three-car convoy near Quneitra Jan. 18 revealed the truth: Hezbollah and Iran are indeed on the Golan and up to no good. So, even as Israel and Hezbollah both signaled that they were finished with their latest round of hostilities, it is nearly certain that the conflict is certain to flare up again, and perhaps much worse next time out. After all, as Iran marches toward a nuclear weapons program the stakes are getting increasingly high.

The most relevant fact about the recent mini-conflict was the nature of the delegation dispatched to the Golan two weeks ago. It seems that the six Hezbollah operatives and perhaps as many as six Iran Revolutionary Guard officers, including Brig. General Mohamed Ali Allahdadi, a confidante of Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, were setting up a missile base. Accordingly, Hezbollah’s retaliatory strike Wednesday from Lebanon—which killed two IDF soldiers and wounded seven more—was meant less to avenge the death of major Iranian and Hezbollah figures, like Jihad Muhghniyeh, the son of the late Hezbollah director of operations, terror mastermind Imad Mughniyeh, than it was to reaffirm the purpose of that three-car convoy targeted by Israel two weeks ago.

According to some Lebanese analysts I spoke with this afternoon, the main point of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s much-anticipated speech today was that the Golan Heights would be Hezbollah’s, and therefore Iran’s, next arena of activity. That’s a marked change from his last public speech, delivered more than two weeks ago, when he reassured Hezbollah’s Shia constituency, which is anxious about fighting in Syria to defend Bashar al-Assad, that the organization was not active on the Golan Heights at all. The Israeli strike on a three-car convoy near Quneitra Jan. 18 revealed the truth: Hezbollah and Iran are indeed on the Golan and up to no good. So, even as Israel and Hezbollah both signaled that they were finished with their latest round of hostilities, it is nearly certain that the conflict is certain to flare up again, and perhaps much worse next time out. After all, as Iran marches toward a nuclear weapons program the stakes are getting increasingly high.

The most relevant fact about the recent mini-conflict was the nature of the delegation dispatched to the Golan two weeks ago. It seems that the six Hezbollah operatives and perhaps as many as six Iran Revolutionary Guard officers, including Brig. General Mohamed Ali Allahdadi, a confidante of Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, were setting up a missile base. Accordingly, Hezbollah’s retaliatory strike Wednesday from Lebanon—which killed two IDF soldiers and wounded seven more—was meant less to avenge the death of major Iranian and Hezbollah figures, like Jihad Muhghniyeh, the son of the late Hezbollah director of operations, terror mastermind Imad Mughniyeh, than it was to reaffirm the purpose of that three-car convoy targeted by Israel two weeks ago.

]]>http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188611/hezbollah-heading-for-the-golan-heights/feed2Why is this Super Bowl Different From All Other Super Bowls?http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188724/why-is-this-super-bowl-different-from-all-other-super-bowls
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188724/why-is-this-super-bowl-different-from-all-other-super-bowls#commentsFri, 30 Jan 2015 23:35:33 +0000Stephanie Butnickhttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188724

Best of luck to the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks in Sunday’s big game. Tablet’s staff skews New England in their fandom, but I’m rooting for Tom Brady’s menorah. We got this.

Israel’s March elections are fast approaching–and still too close to call. Even for devoted Israel watchers, though, it can be difficult to follow the fluctuations of a political scene that features over half-a-dozen parties jockeying for parliamentary position. And that’s before one bumps up against the Hebrew language barrier. Fortunately, Tablet is here to help.

How can one keep track of the many polls released each week–and how reliable are they? Which analysts are writing in English and offering detailed blow-by-blow accounts of the race’s developments? And who makes the best political parody videos lampooning the contest’s participants? Our primer has the answers.

Israel’s March elections are fast approaching–and still too close to call. Even for devoted Israel watchers, though, it can be difficult to follow the fluctuations of a political scene that features over half-a-dozen parties jockeying for parliamentary position. And that’s before one bumps up against the Hebrew language barrier. Fortunately, Tablet is here to help.

How can one keep track of the many polls released each week–and how reliable are they? Which analysts are writing in English and offering detailed blow-by-blow accounts of the race’s developments? And who makes the best political parody videos lampooning the contest’s participants? Our primer has the answers.

Last week a young member of Knesset named Stav Shaffir stepped up to the parliament’s podium and delivered a 3-minute speech that soon became a social media sensation. It was the sort of cri de coeur Capra would have loved: With her shock of red hair, flailing arms, and an innocent conviction all too rare in a legislative body whose members are more likely to pour water on each other than pour out their hearts, Shaffir’s speech was a young woman’s J’accuse.

“You forgot about the Negev and the Galilee in order to transfer 1.2 billion shekel bonuses to the settlements,” she thundered at her colleagues on the right. “You forgot Israel. You lost Zionism already some time ago.”

Last week a young member of Knesset named Stav Shaffir stepped up to the parliament’s podium and delivered a 3-minute speech that soon became a social media sensation. It was the sort of cri de coeur Capra would have loved: With her shock of red hair, flailing arms, and an innocent conviction all too rare in a legislative body whose members are more likely to pour water on each other than pour out their hearts, Shaffir’s speech was a young woman’s J’accuse.

“You forgot about the Negev and the Galilee in order to transfer 1.2 billion shekel bonuses to the settlements,” she thundered at her colleagues on the right. “You forgot Israel. You lost Zionism already some time ago.”

“Are you a ripper, or a cutter?” Sarah Klegman asked me in my kitchen in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles last spring.

We were talking about challah, of course. Klegman, 27, and her baking partner, Elina Tilipman, 30, are the forces behind Challah Hub, a Jewish holy bread and social media project. They’d come over at my behest to spend an afternoon making the traditional Sabbath plaited loaves and brought with them fresh batches of challah dough and salted caramel for the braid.

“Are you a ripper, or a cutter?” Sarah Klegman asked me in my kitchen in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles last spring.

We were talking about challah, of course. Klegman, 27, and her baking partner, Elina Tilipman, 30, are the forces behind Challah Hub, a Jewish holy bread and social media project. They’d come over at my behest to spend an afternoon making the traditional Sabbath plaited loaves and brought with them fresh batches of challah dough and salted caramel for the braid.

Summer camps were another Jewish institution I had skipped during my years in Rocky Point, on Long Island, but in my freshman year of college I discovered a camp quite unlike the others, though I can’t recall how I first heard about it. Many camps were either charitable operations that lifted poor kids out of the sweltering ghetto or lavish sports complexes that reflected the growing wealth and wider horizons of the Jewish middle class. Tennis and camping in the woods became one of their children’s tickets to America. Other camps were routine facilities gussied up with faux-Indian tribal motifs. Camp Massad was different. It consisted of a pair of camps in the Poconos, near the Delaware Water Gap, founded in 1941 by a Zionist family, the Shulsingers, who were mainly in the Jewish publishing business: prayer books, Passover haggadahs, gift books for Chanukah, Hebrew-English dictionaries. The camps’ religious orientation was gently Orthodox but their real mission was to instill Zionism into American youth by immersing them in a wholly (not holy) Hebrew atmosphere. This was exactly what had been missing in my old-style yeshiva, where the primary language, as in Eastern Europe, was Yiddish and the study of Talmud crowded out the rest of the Jewish curriculum. A middle-aged Israeli, Shlomo Shulsinger, abetted by his perky wife, Rivka, ran the camp with a stern voice and an iron hand. Stocky and short, with wavy, iron-gray hair, Shlomo dispensed homilies about the Land—Ha-aretz, the Holy Land—and reprimanded anyone caught speaking even a few words of English. His wife, looking equally strict and fit—I rarely saw her without a soccer ball in her hand—ran the sports programs for the girls’ camp. They became my image of the new Jew, the Israeli chalutzim, pioneers who had returned to the soil, embraced manual labor, and were making the proverbial desert bloom—except, of course, that he and she were living in the United States, hands-on emissaries for the Zionist cause.

I arrived at Massad the same year, 1958, that Leon Uris’s Exodus dominated the bestseller list, soon to be followed by an even more popular film version starring Paul Newman as the Sabra hero. They enshrined a tale that left American Jews bursting with unearned pride, easing the pain and unspoken guilt over what had befallen the Jews in Europe. It told how the Zionists had wrested a homeland from the ashes of the Holocaust and how a new kind of Jew, bold, strong, determined, had sprung forth to supplant the persecuted Jew of the Diaspora—the meek, unworldly Talmud scholar, the exploited worker, the small urban storekeeper like my father. This might explain why Zionism had scarcely impinged on my Orthodox Jewish childhood. I had carried around the blue-and-white collection box of the Jewish National Fund, raising money to plant trees in Israel, green forests in an arid land. But many religious Jews, though excited by the David-and-Goliath story of the birth of the Jewish state, saw Israel as a dubious experiment at odds with the fundamentals of the faith. The epitome of Zionism was the kibbutz, which meant tractors, socialism, and free love, with children separated from their parents and brought up in common as sun-baked young pagans. There were religious Zionists too, pioneers in khaki shorts with tiny knitted skullcaps, but Zionism scorned what it saw as the passivity and otherworldliness of ghetto Judaism, as it also spurned the assimilation and material values of America’s Jews. For many kibbutzniks the Soviet Union was the preferred model; for others it was European social democracy. Giving up the dogmas of religion, they grew fanatically devoted to political disputation and ideological commitment, a fractured legacy of the European Left.

Summer camps were another Jewish institution I had skipped during my years in Rocky Point, on Long Island, but in my freshman year of college I discovered a camp quite unlike the others, though I can’t recall how I first heard about it. Many camps were either charitable operations that lifted poor kids out of the sweltering ghetto or lavish sports complexes that reflected the growing wealth and wider horizons of the Jewish middle class. Tennis and camping in the woods became one of their children’s tickets to America. Other camps were routine facilities gussied up with faux-Indian tribal motifs. Camp Massad was different. It consisted of a pair of camps in the Poconos, near the Delaware Water Gap, founded in 1941 by a Zionist family, the Shulsingers, who were mainly in the Jewish publishing business: prayer books, Passover haggadahs, gift books for Chanukah, Hebrew-English dictionaries. The camps’ religious orientation was gently Orthodox but their real mission was to instill Zionism into American youth by immersing them in a wholly (not holy) Hebrew atmosphere. This was exactly what had been missing in my old-style yeshiva, where the primary language, as in Eastern Europe, was Yiddish and the study of Talmud crowded out the rest of the Jewish curriculum. A middle-aged Israeli, Shlomo Shulsinger, abetted by his perky wife, Rivka, ran the camp with a stern voice and an iron hand. Stocky and short, with wavy, iron-gray hair, Shlomo dispensed homilies about the Land—Ha-aretz, the Holy Land—and reprimanded anyone caught speaking even a few words of English. His wife, looking equally strict and fit—I rarely saw her without a soccer ball in her hand—ran the sports programs for the girls’ camp. They became my image of the new Jew, the Israeli chalutzim, pioneers who had returned to the soil, embraced manual labor, and were making the proverbial desert bloom—except, of course, that he and she were living in the United States, hands-on emissaries for the Zionist cause.

I arrived at Massad the same year, 1958, that Leon Uris’s Exodus dominated the bestseller list, soon to be followed by an even more popular film version starring Paul Newman as the Sabra hero. They enshrined a tale that left American Jews bursting with unearned pride, easing the pain and unspoken guilt over what had befallen the Jews in Europe. It told how the Zionists had wrested a homeland from the ashes of the Holocaust and how a new kind of Jew, bold, strong, determined, had sprung forth to supplant the persecuted Jew of the Diaspora—the meek, unworldly Talmud scholar, the exploited worker, the small urban storekeeper like my father. This might explain why Zionism had scarcely impinged on my Orthodox Jewish childhood. I had carried around the blue-and-white collection box of the Jewish National Fund, raising money to plant trees in Israel, green forests in an arid land. But many religious Jews, though excited by the David-and-Goliath story of the birth of the Jewish state, saw Israel as a dubious experiment at odds with the fundamentals of the faith. The epitome of Zionism was the kibbutz, which meant tractors, socialism, and free love, with children separated from their parents and brought up in common as sun-baked young pagans. There were religious Zionists too, pioneers in khaki shorts with tiny knitted skullcaps, but Zionism scorned what it saw as the passivity and otherworldliness of ghetto Judaism, as it also spurned the assimilation and material values of America’s Jews. For many kibbutzniks the Soviet Union was the preferred model; for others it was European social democracy. Giving up the dogmas of religion, they grew fanatically devoted to political disputation and ideological commitment, a fractured legacy of the European Left.

You may have seen our Tablet tote bags before, either in person or on our Facebook page. They’re emblazoned with fun Jewish slogans like “I’m Kind of a Big Macher,” and “Dayenu, Already,” along with the Tablet logo.

We’re making a new batch, and we figured who better to help us brainstorm new taglines than our readers! After all, you guys will be the lucky recipients—our tote bags serve as prizes for reader contests and giveaways during our fundraising campaigns.

You may have seen our Tablet tote bags before, either in person or on our Facebook page. They’re emblazoned with fun Jewish slogans like “I’m Kind of a Big Macher,” and “Dayenu, Already,” along with the Tablet logo.

We’re making a new batch, and we figured who better to help us brainstorm new taglines than our readers! After all, you guys will be the lucky recipients—our tote bags serve as prizes for reader contests and giveaways during our fundraising campaigns.

Editor’s note: The Personal Belief Exception percentages provided by the KQED search tool, which are quoted below, are for the school’s kindergarten class in the 2014-2015 school year. For context, we’ve added the total number of each school’s kindergarten students that year and the number who filed PBEs, data provided by the California Department of Public Health. The original percentage for Contra Costa Jewish Day School was listed incorrectly.

As you surely know by now, measles—once essentially eliminated in America—is again becoming an epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of cases in the U.S. is at a 20-year high. In the recent outbreak at Disneyland, the vast majority of the victims were unvaccinated.

Editor’s note: The Personal Belief Exception percentages provided by the KQED search tool, which are quoted below, are for the school’s kindergarten class in the 2014-2015 school year. For context, we’ve added the total number of each school’s kindergarten students that year and the number who filed PBEs, data provided by the California Department of Public Health. The original percentage for Contra Costa Jewish Day School was listed incorrectly.

As you surely know by now, measles—once essentially eliminated in America—is again becoming an epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of cases in the U.S. is at a 20-year high. In the recent outbreak at Disneyland, the vast majority of the victims were unvaccinated.

Johnny Depp and Paul Bettany, in Berlin doing publicity for their confusing new film ‘Mortdecai‘ this week, had a particularly revealing interview with Israeli entertainment show ‘Erev Tov With Guy Pines.’

Johnny Depp and Paul Bettany, in Berlin doing publicity for their confusing new film ‘Mortdecai‘ this week, had a particularly revealing interview with Israeli entertainment show ‘Erev Tov With Guy Pines.’

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven injured yesterday in a Hezbollah attack on IDF vehicles near the easternmost part of the Israel-Lebanon border. Five Kornet rockets were fired at a military convoy, in what was the first fatal attack conducted by Hezbollah in the north since the Second Lebanon War ended in 2006. The IDF returned fire, apparently leading to the death of a U.N. peacekeeping soldier from Spain. The attack came in response to a drone strike earlier this month in the Syrian Golan Heights, which led to the death of six Hezbollah militants and a senior Iranian officer. Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the deaths, though it is widely believed to have been a targeted strike against a group that was planning attacks on the Golan Heights in Israel. (Whether or not the Iranian officer was the intended beneficiary of the drone’s missile is unclear.) Additionally, on Tuesday, two rockets fell in the Golan, prompting the evacuation of the ski resort on Mt. Hermon.

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven injured yesterday in a Hezbollah attack on IDF vehicles near the easternmost part of the Israel-Lebanon border. Five Kornet rockets were fired at a military convoy, in what was the first fatal attack conducted by Hezbollah in the north since the Second Lebanon War ended in 2006. The IDF returned fire, apparently leading to the death of a U.N. peacekeeping soldier from Spain. The attack came in response to a drone strike earlier this month in the Syrian Golan Heights, which led to the death of six Hezbollah militants and a senior Iranian officer. Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the deaths, though it is widely believed to have been a targeted strike against a group that was planning attacks on the Golan Heights in Israel. (Whether or not the Iranian officer was the intended beneficiary of the drone’s missile is unclear.) Additionally, on Tuesday, two rockets fell in the Golan, prompting the evacuation of the ski resort on Mt. Hermon.

Our journey to Auschwitz was long. The fog and the wind were so bad that our flight from Tel Aviv to Krakow was diverted to Warsaw. We drove all night to get there and arrived at Auschwitz exhausted. The trip wasn’t easy, and we barely made it in time to visit the museum before the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation. Then again, it should never be easy to come to this place. And nothing—not talking to survivors or reading extensively about it or teaching it or visiting other museums about it—prepared me for this visit.

For 70 years, it’s been said, “Never forget.” Never forget the marginalization, the stereotyping, the isolation and the dehumanization of Jews, Gypsies and other vulnerable minorities. Never forget that moment it became acceptable to consider them unworthy of life. Never forget the genocide. Never forget their lives, or the systematic attempt to eliminate an entire people.

Our journey to Auschwitz was long. The fog and the wind were so bad that our flight from Tel Aviv to Krakow was diverted to Warsaw. We drove all night to get there and arrived at Auschwitz exhausted. The trip wasn’t easy, and we barely made it in time to visit the museum before the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation. Then again, it should never be easy to come to this place. And nothing—not talking to survivors or reading extensively about it or teaching it or visiting other museums about it—prepared me for this visit.

For 70 years, it’s been said, “Never forget.” Never forget the marginalization, the stereotyping, the isolation and the dehumanization of Jews, Gypsies and other vulnerable minorities. Never forget that moment it became acceptable to consider them unworthy of life. Never forget the genocide. Never forget their lives, or the systematic attempt to eliminate an entire people.

Ishmael Khaldi is frustrated with the local council. He’s been campaigning four years for a dilapidated road to be repaved outside his village, Khawaled. It would cut the distance to jobs, shops, and health clinics by 80 percent. The council keeps inventing excuses not to re-lay the road. “It’s haflaf,” he says. “It’s chakamaka.” The words both mean a lack of planning and professionalism. They’re Arabic in origin but common slang among Israeli Jews. I ask him about the usage. “It’s Israeli language,” he says. “The mixture of Arabic and Hebrew.” Which is just about where Khaldi fits.

The Zionists who founded Kibbutz Kfar Ha-Maccabi in the 1930s brought the people of Khawaled to work in their apple orchards. Each day the Bedouin went down the old Ottoman road to labor on the land. The same road took them on to the town of Kiryat Ata for medical treatment or shopping. With the establishment of Israel, the Khawaled understood their prosperity was tied to the economy of Kfar Ha-Maccabi and the two other kibbutzim on the Kiryat Ata road—Usha and Ramat Yochanan. So, the Bedouin voted for the political parties that represented the kibbutzniks. They went to the Israeli army, too, where most served in tracking units.

Ishmael Khaldi is frustrated with the local council. He’s been campaigning four years for a dilapidated road to be repaved outside his village, Khawaled. It would cut the distance to jobs, shops, and health clinics by 80 percent. The council keeps inventing excuses not to re-lay the road. “It’s haflaf,” he says. “It’s chakamaka.” The words both mean a lack of planning and professionalism. They’re Arabic in origin but common slang among Israeli Jews. I ask him about the usage. “It’s Israeli language,” he says. “The mixture of Arabic and Hebrew.” Which is just about where Khaldi fits.

The Zionists who founded Kibbutz Kfar Ha-Maccabi in the 1930s brought the people of Khawaled to work in their apple orchards. Each day the Bedouin went down the old Ottoman road to labor on the land. The same road took them on to the town of Kiryat Ata for medical treatment or shopping. With the establishment of Israel, the Khawaled understood their prosperity was tied to the economy of Kfar Ha-Maccabi and the two other kibbutzim on the Kiryat Ata road—Usha and Ramat Yochanan. So, the Bedouin voted for the political parties that represented the kibbutzniks. They went to the Israeli army, too, where most served in tracking units.

It says something about the current moment in the Middle East—and about us—that we’re already able to treat the stone-age viciousness of the Islamic State in the blasé manner once reserved for news about the latest failure in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks or Iran’s latest expansion of its nuclear program. We know now that IS has beheaded one of its two Japanese hostages last week, and so it’s only a matter of time before they kill the other: The fact that IS cuts people’s heads off with knives, videotapes these savage acts, and turns them into Islamist snuff films that serve as powerful recruitment tools across the Middle East and Europe is simply par for the course. A single beheading video makes only a minor impact on viewers who have become accustomed to a steady diet of Middle Eastern gore available on both CNN and YouTube—including decapitations, crucifixions, mass sexual enslavement of non-Muslim minors, and throwing homosexuals off of towers, in addition of course to the usual run of torture, rape, and murder.

But the biggest problem with Islamic State and the Sunni-Shiite war they’re fighting isn’t the brutal methods that the group has adopted to further its cause. As Lebanese political analyst Elie Fawaz told me recently in Beirut, it’s how that violence to which the Middle East is now being conditioned will shape Arab societies in which a new generation with no memory of any other reality will come to hold power. “These guys are cutting off people’s heads,” said Fawaz. “So, what’s it going to be like when they’re walking around the streets here in Lebanon or elsewhere in the region?”

It says something about the current moment in the Middle East—and about us—that we’re already able to treat the stone-age viciousness of the Islamic State in the blasé manner once reserved for news about the latest failure in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks or Iran’s latest expansion of its nuclear program. We know now that IS has beheaded one of its two Japanese hostages last week, and so it’s only a matter of time before they kill the other: The fact that IS cuts people’s heads off with knives, videotapes these savage acts, and turns them into Islamist snuff films that serve as powerful recruitment tools across the Middle East and Europe is simply par for the course. A single beheading video makes only a minor impact on viewers who have become accustomed to a steady diet of Middle Eastern gore available on both CNN and YouTube—including decapitations, crucifixions, mass sexual enslavement of non-Muslim minors, and throwing homosexuals off of towers, in addition of course to the usual run of torture, rape, and murder.

But the biggest problem with Islamic State and the Sunni-Shiite war they’re fighting isn’t the brutal methods that the group has adopted to further its cause. As Lebanese political analyst Elie Fawaz told me recently in Beirut, it’s how that violence to which the Middle East is now being conditioned will shape Arab societies in which a new generation with no memory of any other reality will come to hold power. “These guys are cutting off people’s heads,” said Fawaz. “So, what’s it going to be like when they’re walking around the streets here in Lebanon or elsewhere in the region?”

These are strange days for The Merchant of Venice in London. In the aftermath of the recent Paris terror attacks, tensions in the United Kingdom run high: the chief of MI5 recently said that an attack in the U.K. was “highly likely.” Anti-Semitic violence was on the rise in 2014, even if reports of pessimism amongst Britain’s Jews may have been overhyped. The Merchant of Venice has always been the most problematic of Shakespeare’s problem plays; even when things are quiet, it makes audiences uneasy. But Rupert Goold’s new production of the play, which opened last month at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, plunges headlong into the controversy.

These are strange days for The Merchant of Venice in London. In the aftermath of the recent Paris terror attacks, tensions in the United Kingdom run high: the chief of MI5 recently said that an attack in the U.K. was “highly likely.” Anti-Semitic violence was on the rise in 2014, even if reports of pessimism amongst Britain’s Jews may have been overhyped. The Merchant of Venice has always been the most problematic of Shakespeare’s problem plays; even when things are quiet, it makes audiences uneasy. But Rupert Goold’s new production of the play, which opened last month at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, plunges headlong into the controversy.

Since New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced he wouldn’t formally resign from his post after being arrested for corruption, Albany has determined to take the matter out of his hands, the New York Timesreports.

After 20 years in power, Silver is in the middle of a swift and brutal fall from grace—prosecutors allege he illegally acquired nearly $4 million in an ongoing scheme that included taking bribes or making arrangements to benefit New York law firms in exchange for payments he failed to report.

Since New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced he wouldn’t formally resign from his post after being arrested for corruption, Albany has determined to take the matter out of his hands, the New York Timesreports.

After 20 years in power, Silver is in the middle of a swift and brutal fall from grace—prosecutors allege he illegally acquired nearly $4 million in an ongoing scheme that included taking bribes or making arrangements to benefit New York law firms in exchange for payments he failed to report.

Why do people who are not clinically crazy throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide? The sociological answer to this question assumes a pettiness in human nature, such that even the slightest of humiliations and misfortunes may be regarded as sufficiently devastating, under certain conditions, as to sweep aside the gravest of moral considerations. I prefer to invoke the history of ideas. People throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide because they have come under the influence of malign doctrinal systems, which appear to address the most profound and pressing of human problems—and do so by openly rebelling against the gravest of moral considerations. Doctrines of this sort render their adepts mad, not in a clinical sense but in an everyday sense. And the power to drive people mad comes precisely from the profundity, or the seeming profundity—which is what everyone else fails to see.

The Islamist movement—the case at hand—got its start in Egypt circa in 1930 in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a puritanical religious campaign devoted to the encouragement of rectitude; and rectitude is all that some people notice about Islamists today. The movement came out in favor of the decolonization of Egypt, the utopian resurrection of the Islamic caliphate of yore, and, most of all, opposition to Zionism, which transformed the movement into a mass political phenomenon; and anti-colonialism is all that still other people see. But the movement also took on a philosophical dimension.

Why do people who are not clinically crazy throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide? The sociological answer to this question assumes a pettiness in human nature, such that even the slightest of humiliations and misfortunes may be regarded as sufficiently devastating, under certain conditions, as to sweep aside the gravest of moral considerations. I prefer to invoke the history of ideas. People throw themselves into campaigns of murder and suicide because they have come under the influence of malign doctrinal systems, which appear to address the most profound and pressing of human problems—and do so by openly rebelling against the gravest of moral considerations. Doctrines of this sort render their adepts mad, not in a clinical sense but in an everyday sense. And the power to drive people mad comes precisely from the profundity, or the seeming profundity—which is what everyone else fails to see.

The Islamist movement—the case at hand—got its start in Egypt circa in 1930 in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a puritanical religious campaign devoted to the encouragement of rectitude; and rectitude is all that some people notice about Islamists today. The movement came out in favor of the decolonization of Egypt, the utopian resurrection of the Islamic caliphate of yore, and, most of all, opposition to Zionism, which transformed the movement into a mass political phenomenon; and anti-colonialism is all that still other people see. But the movement also took on a philosophical dimension.

Alone in my living room, I took three steps backward, then three steps forward in preparation for the Shmoneh Esrei, part of the afternoon prayer service. As I began to recite the first blessing, an image came to mind, unbidden: a Renaissance-era depiction of Jesus.

What was this picture doing in my head? I’m an Orthodox Jew. I don’t believe in Jesus—I never have. Why did this picture, of all things, come to mind while I was trying to address G-d?

Alone in my living room, I took three steps backward, then three steps forward in preparation for the Shmoneh Esrei, part of the afternoon prayer service. As I began to recite the first blessing, an image came to mind, unbidden: a Renaissance-era depiction of Jesus.

What was this picture doing in my head? I’m an Orthodox Jew. I don’t believe in Jesus—I never have. Why did this picture, of all things, come to mind while I was trying to address G-d?

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz could not have coincided with a more politically fraught moment for the French government. After all, 75,000 Jews were deported from France during the reign of the collaborationist Vichy regime and most of the deportees never returned. Three weeks ago, homegrown French jihadists staged bloody assaults upon the Charlie Hebdo offices and a kosher supermarket in Paris. The two attacks killed 17 people, half a dozen of them Jewish. The French government was deeply cognizant of the need to reassure its frightened Jewish citizens of its commitment to their security.

The morning’s frigid cold and grey sky offered an appropriately morose atmosphere for the proceedings. French President Francois Hollande’s speech at the Mémorial de la Shoah in the Marais would be delivered in front of hundreds of survivors. A trio of representatives of The Sons and Daughter of the Deported Jews of France carried banners and stood in their picturesque blue uniforms. An octogenarian walking with a cane had her decades-old yellow star pinned to her tremendous coat, with a small sign that related how she had been deported at the age of six from the French capital’s tony 16th arrondissement.

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz could not have coincided with a more politically fraught moment for the French government. After all, 75,000 Jews were deported from France during the reign of the collaborationist Vichy regime and most of the deportees never returned. Three weeks ago, homegrown French jihadists staged bloody assaults upon the Charlie Hebdo offices and a kosher supermarket in Paris. The two attacks killed 17 people, half a dozen of them Jewish. The French government was deeply cognizant of the need to reassure its frightened Jewish citizens of its commitment to their security.

The morning’s frigid cold and grey sky offered an appropriately morose atmosphere for the proceedings. French President Francois Hollande’s speech at the Mémorial de la Shoah in the Marais would be delivered in front of hundreds of survivors. A trio of representatives of The Sons and Daughter of the Deported Jews of France carried banners and stood in their picturesque blue uniforms. An octogenarian walking with a cane had her decades-old yellow star pinned to her tremendous coat, with a small sign that related how she had been deported at the age of six from the French capital’s tony 16th arrondissement.

Okay, so we all heard about the drama leading up to the Miss Universe pageant, right? How Miss Israel posted a picture to her Instagram posed happily with Miss Lebanon (and Miss Slovenia and Miss Japan, neither of whom really has a beleaguered Semitic-language speaking dog in this fight), and everyone was like, “OMG! Israel and Lebanon, together, smiling, with weird Barbie-doll boobs and waists! Maybe the Miss Universe pageant is more than an excuse for Donald Trump to contractually grope scantily-clad 21-year-olds who don’t speak English but are not technically prostitutes! Maybe peace in the Middle East is possible after all!”

Well, our naïve hopes that a seemingly intractable conflict could be solved through a friendly exchange of tips on applying false eyelashes and hair care techniques were foiled when Miss Lebanon (whether as mandated by the Lebanese Miss Universe Board of Directors, if such a thing exists, or of her own volition, we’ll never really know) posted her response to the photo, claiming that Miss Israel, that pushy, pushy Jew, had shoved her way into a perfectly civilized Judenrein conversation they were having about sushi and the work of Zeljko Ivanek and photo-bombed her, just to make her look bad to her friends! Miss Lebanon may be forced by custom to share a stage with Miss Illegal-Zionist-Entity, but she would never, ever, ever have willingly posed for an actual photograph with her! The nerve!

Okay, so we all heard about the drama leading up to the Miss Universe pageant, right? How Miss Israel posted a picture to her Instagram posed happily with Miss Lebanon (and Miss Slovenia and Miss Japan, neither of whom really has a beleaguered Semitic-language speaking dog in this fight), and everyone was like, “OMG! Israel and Lebanon, together, smiling, with weird Barbie-doll boobs and waists! Maybe the Miss Universe pageant is more than an excuse for Donald Trump to contractually grope scantily-clad 21-year-olds who don’t speak English but are not technically prostitutes! Maybe peace in the Middle East is possible after all!”

Well, our naïve hopes that a seemingly intractable conflict could be solved through a friendly exchange of tips on applying false eyelashes and hair care techniques were foiled when Miss Lebanon (whether as mandated by the Lebanese Miss Universe Board of Directors, if such a thing exists, or of her own volition, we’ll never really know) posted her response to the photo, claiming that Miss Israel, that pushy, pushy Jew, had shoved her way into a perfectly civilized Judenrein conversation they were having about sushi and the work of Zeljko Ivanek and photo-bombed her, just to make her look bad to her friends! Miss Lebanon may be forced by custom to share a stage with Miss Illegal-Zionist-Entity, but she would never, ever, ever have willingly posed for an actual photograph with her! The nerve!

David Landau, a pivotal figure in Israeli journalism and the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, died today in Jerusalem. He was 67.

Landau, who was born in the U.K., moved to Israel in 1970 and began working at the Jerusalem Post, where he stayed for 20 years as the paper’s political correspondent and later as managing editor. He joined the staff of Haaretz in 1993 and founded the newspaper’s English edition in 1997. He later served as editor-in-chief of Haaretz and until last year wrote a regular column for the paper.

David Landau, a pivotal figure in Israeli journalism and the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, died today in Jerusalem. He was 67.

Landau, who was born in the U.K., moved to Israel in 1970 and began working at the Jerusalem Post, where he stayed for 20 years as the paper’s political correspondent and later as managing editor. He joined the staff of Haaretz in 1993 and founded the newspaper’s English edition in 1997. He later served as editor-in-chief of Haaretz and until last year wrote a regular column for the paper.

On July 13, 2014, the Associated Press reported that “Pro-Palestinian protesters tried to force their way into a Paris synagogue Sunday with bats and chairs, then fought with security officers who blocked their way.” The article cited both eyewitnesses and police. “A police spokeswoman said the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue in eastern Paris was targeted during a service, and worshippers were blocked inside while police pushed protesters back,” the piece continued. “Aline Le Bail-Kremer watched the incident unfold from her window across the street. She said protesters came from two directions and converged on the synagogue, grabbing chairs from sidewalk cafes and wielding bats as they tried to push past security guards.” Video footage soon emerged showing members of the French Jewish Defense League fending off the attackers.

As one would expect, this incident was reported as an anti-Semitic attack by many journalists on the ground–including the New York Times, which noted that the mob chanted “Death to Jews”–and was described as such by France’s Prime Minister. Yet in some corners of the media, particularly online, skeptics insisted that the entire incident had been fabricated for propaganda purposes. These critics recast the JDL who repelled the mob as instigators who provoked the entire affair, or at least misrepresented a street fight as an anti-Semitic attack. And to make their case, the skeptics cited a seemingly unimpeachable source: the synagogue’s own president, Serge Benhaim, who allegedly told an interviewer that no substantive assault had taken place. But as a recent Guardian investigation reveals, that interview has been dramatically misrepresented–and in fact states the opposite.

On July 13, 2014, the Associated Press reported that “Pro-Palestinian protesters tried to force their way into a Paris synagogue Sunday with bats and chairs, then fought with security officers who blocked their way.” The article cited both eyewitnesses and police. “A police spokeswoman said the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue in eastern Paris was targeted during a service, and worshippers were blocked inside while police pushed protesters back,” the piece continued. “Aline Le Bail-Kremer watched the incident unfold from her window across the street. She said protesters came from two directions and converged on the synagogue, grabbing chairs from sidewalk cafes and wielding bats as they tried to push past security guards.” Video footage soon emerged showing members of the French Jewish Defense League fending off the attackers.

As one would expect, this incident was reported as an anti-Semitic attack by many journalists on the ground–including the New York Times, which noted that the mob chanted “Death to Jews”–and was described as such by France’s Prime Minister. Yet in some corners of the media, particularly online, skeptics insisted that the entire incident had been fabricated for propaganda purposes. These critics recast the JDL who repelled the mob as instigators who provoked the entire affair, or at least misrepresented a street fight as an anti-Semitic attack. And to make their case, the skeptics cited a seemingly unimpeachable source: the synagogue’s own president, Serge Benhaim, who allegedly told an interviewer that no substantive assault had taken place. But as a recent Guardian investigation reveals, that interview has been dramatically misrepresented–and in fact states the opposite.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day of solemn ceremonies with heads of state memorializing the six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis as well as remembrances of victims and celebrations of survivors across the world and online (many using the Twitter hashtag #IRememberBy). But many Holocaust survivors have been painfully overlooked in recent years. Last year on this day we published “Soon There Will Be No More Survivors,” a searing portrait of nine Holocaust survivors living in poverty in New York City.

The statistics were staggering: one in four of the 140,000 Holocaust survivors in the United States are living at or below the poverty line. In response to the piece, many readers wrote in asking how they could help, so we compiled a list of some of the organizations helping Holocaust survivors in New York. What better day than today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, to make sure we don’t forget the Holocaust survivors currently in need.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day of solemn ceremonies with heads of state memorializing the six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis as well as remembrances of victims and celebrations of survivors across the world and online (many using the Twitter hashtag #IRememberBy). But many Holocaust survivors have been painfully overlooked in recent years. Last year on this day we published “Soon There Will Be No More Survivors,” a searing portrait of nine Holocaust survivors living in poverty in New York City.

The statistics were staggering: one in four of the 140,000 Holocaust survivors in the United States are living at or below the poverty line. In response to the piece, many readers wrote in asking how they could help, so we compiled a list of some of the organizations helping Holocaust survivors in New York. What better day than today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, to make sure we don’t forget the Holocaust survivors currently in need.

Forget about Deflategate, there’s a bigger Tom Brady mystery brewing. Mark Leibovich profiled the New England Patriots quarterback in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine—an excellent read, with plenty of gems for those of us more interested in Brady’s Uggs (he sports a brand new pair during one interview!) than Sunday’s Super Bowl—and one brief aside jumped out at us.

Leibovich is at Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s new Brookline, Mass. mansion (a “barnlike guesthouse” is being built for the supermodel’s photo shoots), when he spies something unusual: a menorah.

Forget about Deflategate, there’s a bigger Tom Brady mystery brewing. Mark Leibovich profiled the New England Patriots quarterback in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine—an excellent read, with plenty of gems for those of us more interested in Brady’s Uggs (he sports a brand new pair during one interview!) than Sunday’s Super Bowl—and one brief aside jumped out at us.

Leibovich is at Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s new Brookline, Mass. mansion (a “barnlike guesthouse” is being built for the supermodel’s photo shoots), when he spies something unusual: a menorah.

It was at a party in early 2002, a few months after the Sept. 11 attacks, that I first heard someone declare, as if it was self-evident, that the George W. Bush Administration was fascist. The accusation refuted itself, of course—people living under a fascist regime don’t go around loudly attacking the regime at parties—but it was symptomatic of the times. Post-Sept. 11 paranoia took many forms, and one of them was paranoia about the American government (and not just in “truther” circles). If you read Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, for instance, or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—both products of the first years after Sept. 11—you will see how the fear and dread the attacks provoked could easily be transferred from the Islamic fanatics who actually perpetrated them to the United States itself.

One need not forgive the serious crimes of the Bush Administration—the failed wars, the torture and renditions, the Orwellian surveillance—to note that, among much of the left, the hatred of George W. Bush was a psychological projection or substitution. This was particularly true, I think, among many Jewish leftists. After all, when a terrorist movement emerged whose explicit aim was to murder Americans and Jews, it was considerably more comfortable for some American Jews to claim to be afraid of their own government, which was not out to get them, than to admit that they were afraid of Islamic fundamentalists, who actually were. Condemning the injustices of the Bush Administration would not get your head cut off, like Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or your bus bombed, as happened in Israel over and over again during the Second Intifada.

It was at a party in early 2002, a few months after the Sept. 11 attacks, that I first heard someone declare, as if it was self-evident, that the George W. Bush Administration was fascist. The accusation refuted itself, of course—people living under a fascist regime don’t go around loudly attacking the regime at parties—but it was symptomatic of the times. Post-Sept. 11 paranoia took many forms, and one of them was paranoia about the American government (and not just in “truther” circles). If you read Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, for instance, or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—both products of the first years after Sept. 11—you will see how the fear and dread the attacks provoked could easily be transferred from the Islamic fanatics who actually perpetrated them to the United States itself.

One need not forgive the serious crimes of the Bush Administration—the failed wars, the torture and renditions, the Orwellian surveillance—to note that, among much of the left, the hatred of George W. Bush was a psychological projection or substitution. This was particularly true, I think, among many Jewish leftists. After all, when a terrorist movement emerged whose explicit aim was to murder Americans and Jews, it was considerably more comfortable for some American Jews to claim to be afraid of their own government, which was not out to get them, than to admit that they were afraid of Islamic fundamentalists, who actually were. Condemning the injustices of the Bush Administration would not get your head cut off, like Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or your bus bombed, as happened in Israel over and over again during the Second Intifada.

When it comes to marriage, American law is straightforwardly binary: You can be married or you can be unmarried. A wedding moves you from one group to the other, and a divorce moves you in the opposite direction, but there is no status in between. As we have seen over the last several months of reading Tractate Yevamot, however, Talmudic law is not so simple. Marriage itself is a two-stage process: A couple is first betrothed, and then, once they have sexual relations or undergo a marriage ceremony, they become fully married. Then there is levirate betrothal: If a man’s brother dies childless, he is bound to his widowed sister-in-law unless and until they either get married or perform the ceremony of chalitza.

When it comes to marriage, American law is straightforwardly binary: You can be married or you can be unmarried. A wedding moves you from one group to the other, and a divorce moves you in the opposite direction, but there is no status in between. As we have seen over the last several months of reading Tractate Yevamot, however, Talmudic law is not so simple. Marriage itself is a two-stage process: A couple is first betrothed, and then, once they have sexual relations or undergo a marriage ceremony, they become fully married. Then there is levirate betrothal: If a man’s brother dies childless, he is bound to his widowed sister-in-law unless and until they either get married or perform the ceremony of chalitza.

We were about seventy people in the boxcar speeding into the unknown. I say “about” seventy, because none of us was able to come up with an exact number, although many had counted. This compulsive counting was a means of not counting the members of one’s own family, both those present in this boxcar and those who had already perished; or was it a way of escaping the thought of what was to come after we reached our destination; or perhaps it was merely a pastime?

The floor of the wagon shook. The people sitting there swayed to and fro like sheaves in the wind. There were children amongst us, there were babies miraculously saved from previous deportations—exhausted, tiny bundles of life, bathed in perspiration, wriggling and squirming in the protective arms of their mothers, crawling up their mothers’ shoulders. They wailed, gasping, trying to inhale with open mouths more air than was possible. How could a world without children continue to exist?

We were about seventy people in the boxcar speeding into the unknown. I say “about” seventy, because none of us was able to come up with an exact number, although many had counted. This compulsive counting was a means of not counting the members of one’s own family, both those present in this boxcar and those who had already perished; or was it a way of escaping the thought of what was to come after we reached our destination; or perhaps it was merely a pastime?

The floor of the wagon shook. The people sitting there swayed to and fro like sheaves in the wind. There were children amongst us, there were babies miraculously saved from previous deportations—exhausted, tiny bundles of life, bathed in perspiration, wriggling and squirming in the protective arms of their mothers, crawling up their mothers’ shoulders. They wailed, gasping, trying to inhale with open mouths more air than was possible. How could a world without children continue to exist?

]]>http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/188492/in-the-boxcar/feed0When the Grandchild of Lithuanian Jews Hidden During the Holocaust Visits Vilnius, She Discovers More than Just Historyhttp://tabletmag.com/scroll/188534/finding-history-and-myself-in-vilnius
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188534/finding-history-and-myself-in-vilnius#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 00:38:45 +0000Maia Ipphttp://tabletmag.com/?p=188534

Like many grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, I grew up with the sense that Eastern Europe was a toxic wasteland of suffering and loss. On those rare instances when Lithuania, home to my family on both sides for generations, was mentioned, it was as the backdrop for my grandmother’s stories about the Kovno ghetto: forced labor, humiliations, and deportations. Lithuania became a mythical place in my imagination—cold, gray, hostile, and, most emphatically, empty. I collected the shards of my grandmother’s stories and absorbed the community directive to never forget. But there was also an unspoken imperative that exhorted us precisely to forget—to forget that so much of the Jewishness we still see, hear, and taste around us is a product of those now-trayf places.

Five years ago, I began participating in a group with a dozen other grandchildren of survivors. Over years of often-difficult meetings, I began to form an image of a Jewish identity unlike the one I grew up with: one that didn’t have the darkness of the Holocaust as its central force. But could there really be an alternative, something that authentically celebrates what existed before the war? As these thoughts and questions were coalescing in my mind last spring, I happened upon the website for a writing residency in Vilnius, and I applied.

Like many grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, I grew up with the sense that Eastern Europe was a toxic wasteland of suffering and loss. On those rare instances when Lithuania, home to my family on both sides for generations, was mentioned, it was as the backdrop for my grandmother’s stories about the Kovno ghetto: forced labor, humiliations, and deportations. Lithuania became a mythical place in my imagination—cold, gray, hostile, and, most emphatically, empty. I collected the shards of my grandmother’s stories and absorbed the community directive to never forget. But there was also an unspoken imperative that exhorted us precisely to forget—to forget that so much of the Jewishness we still see, hear, and taste around us is a product of those now-trayf places.

Five years ago, I began participating in a group with a dozen other grandchildren of survivors. Over years of often-difficult meetings, I began to form an image of a Jewish identity unlike the one I grew up with: one that didn’t have the darkness of the Holocaust as its central force. But could there really be an alternative, something that authentically celebrates what existed before the war? As these thoughts and questions were coalescing in my mind last spring, I happened upon the website for a writing residency in Vilnius, and I applied.

As the troubling drama of Alberto Nisman’s death grows even more tense, Jewish journalist Damian Pachter has fled Argentina, writing about his ordeal in a personal essay for Haaretz.Pachter was the first journalist to break the news of Nisman’s mysterious death of a gunshot wound to the head the day before the prosecutor was set to present evidence implicating the Argentinian government in covering up details of the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center.

Governmental authorities speculated at first that it was a suicide, and then the work of a disgruntled former Argentinian agent, in a conspiracy they say casts doubt on Nisman’s evidence against the current regime.

As the troubling drama of Alberto Nisman’s death grows even more tense, Jewish journalist Damian Pachter has fled Argentina, writing about his ordeal in a personal essay for Haaretz.Pachter was the first journalist to break the news of Nisman’s mysterious death of a gunshot wound to the head the day before the prosecutor was set to present evidence implicating the Argentinian government in covering up details of the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center.

Governmental authorities speculated at first that it was a suicide, and then the work of a disgruntled former Argentinian agent, in a conspiracy they say casts doubt on Nisman’s evidence against the current regime.

This was the year of the outsider for the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, whose funds are provided by the Israel state lottery. For the first time in its 14-year history, the prize was given to a writer who doesn’t live in the state of Israel: Reuven Namdar, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, won for his second novel, The Ruined House.

The 51-year-old writer is a Jerusalem native who first came to the U.S. after his army service, hoping to learn about his family’s heritage. His mother is from Iran’s Mashhadi Jewish community, many of whom immigrated to New York during the Iranian Revolution. Namdar stayed in New York, becoming part of the Israeli literary diaspora revolutionizing Hebrew literature.

This was the year of the outsider for the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, whose funds are provided by the Israel state lottery. For the first time in its 14-year history, the prize was given to a writer who doesn’t live in the state of Israel: Reuven Namdar, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, won for his second novel, The Ruined House.

The 51-year-old writer is a Jerusalem native who first came to the U.S. after his army service, hoping to learn about his family’s heritage. His mother is from Iran’s Mashhadi Jewish community, many of whom immigrated to New York during the Iranian Revolution. Namdar stayed in New York, becoming part of the Israeli literary diaspora revolutionizing Hebrew literature.